Mechanistic insights into atmospheric and room-temperature plasma (ARTP)-induced genomic alterations and phenotypic evolution in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Under high-lethality ARTP conditions (~99% mortality) in diploid Saccharomyces cerevisiae, SNVs and InDels increase 25.2- and 36.7-fold, with LOH rising 57.4-fold.

• Why it matters: ARTP is widely used for microbial strain engineering, but its genome-wide mutagenic mechanism has been a “black box,” limiting rational optimization for directed evolution.
• What they did: Using genome-wide mutational profiling and DNA repair pathway assays, the study maps ARTP-induced SNV/InDel spectra and LOH, and uses sectored colony assays to infer pre-replicative DSBs and reciprocal crossovers.
• The result: Translesion synthesis polymerases Rev1 and Pol ζ are indispensable for fixing ARTP-induced lesions into point mutations, while nucleotide excision repair predominates in mitigating mutations and iterative ARTP yields rapid acetate-tolerant evolution.