Long telomeres induce a genome-wide transcriptional response in budding yeast

While short telomeres are known to activate DNA damage responses and limit cell proliferation, long telomeres are associated with extended proliferative capacity, but their broader cellular consequences remain less well understood. In budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, long telomeres have been shown to influence gene expression at specific loci, but whether long telomeres affect transcription genome-wide has not been reported.

Here, we analysed the transcriptomes of diploid yeast strains in a single lineage in which long telomeres were initially generated by a rif2delta mutation and subsequently inherited through successive rounds of mitosis and meiosis in the absence of this mutation. We show that strains with long telomeres exhibit a distinct gene expression profile, enriched in transcripts encoding membrane transporters. Both up- and down-regulated genes were distributed across the genome, arguing against a purely telomere-proximal effect on gene expression.