Surprising regulatory plasticity for the conserved HOG pathway in diverse Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains

First-author preprint from my doctoral work. The HOG network in S. cerevisiae has been the paradigm for stress-specific MAPK signalling, but most of that work was done in laboratory strains that are genetic outliers. Comparing hog1Δ mutants in a laboratory strain and in diverse wild strains, we find an expanded role for Hog1 in cross-stress protection and gene expression in wild yeast, suggesting the osmospecificity of lab-strain Hog1 is lineage-specific rather than ancestral.