Morphological Profiling in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Development of high-content imaging techniques

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Drug discovery are based on elucidation of the potential mechanisms of action and cellular targets of candidate chemical compounds. We developed high-content imaging techniques in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, allowing simultaneous analysis of morphological phenotypes regarding to cell shape, actin and nucleus. We proposed a novel strategy to identify drug targets by combining phenome database and high-content imaging in yeast. In this approach, we infer the cellular functions affected by candidate drugs by comparing morphologic profiles induced by the compounds with the phenotypes of yeast mutants. Using this method and four well-characterized reagents, we successfully identified previously known target genes of the compounds as well as other genes involved with functionally related cellular pathways. We also expanded our morphological analyses on other cellular structures. We succeeded to extract 1,111 parameters from digital images of 9 subcellular structures including cell shape, nuclear DNA, mitochondria, actin structures, spindle pole bodies, septin rings, the vacuole, the cis- and trans-Golgi. With advancements in our study, systematic and comprehensive morphological analyses will inevitably continue to progress.