Turgor
Salt, heat, starve or poison a living yeast cell and watch it raise the alarm and fight back
Turgor
A budding yeast cell under stress. Shake salt over it, turn up the heat, take its sugar away or drip peroxide on it, and watch it respond in real time: the cell shrinks and recovers, alarm proteins rush into the nucleus, and live charts track what is happening inside.
Play Turgor (needs a browser with WebGPU: recent Chrome, Edge or Safari)
What you can do
- Salt: drag the shaker over the cell and shake. The cell loses water and shrinks, and Hog1 moves into the nucleus to restore its pressure.
- Heat: turn the knob up to 46 °C. Pab1 gathers into stress granules, and Hsp104 later clears them.
- Sugar: take the food away. The inside of the cell turns acidic and stiffens, and Msn2 flashes in and out of the nucleus.
- Peroxide: add drops. Yap1 moves into the nucleus and the cell pauses its division until it has cleared the peroxide.
- Water: wash the salt and peroxide away.
- Swap the yeast for mutants lacking Hog1, Hsp104, Msn2/4 or Yap1, and see what each protein is for.
The science
The responses come from a model built from published measurements of real yeast cells, with every value traced to its source. Where no measurement exists, the value is illustrative and marked as such. An Experimenter mode lets you run the cell through challenges and compare it with the data.