Source: BMC Medical Genomics (Open Access, 20 March 2008)
Article Type: Original Research
Authors: Pan Z et al.

Pterostilbene, a dimethylether analog of resveratrol, has long been known for its antioxidant, antifungal and antiinflammatory activities (to mention just a few). However, little is known on its mechanism(s) of action. In the present study, Pan et al. incubated S. cerevisiae (a common model organism for the identification of therapeutic compounds) with 70 µM (= IC50) pterostilbene prior running extensive transcript profiling experiments.
In a nutshell, pterostilbene affected the expression of >1000 genes (up: 1007; down: 182).

“We have identified the molecular pathways affected by pterostilbene, and our results show that pterostilbene affects the expression of a diverse group of genes in yeast cells.Using Gene Ontology-based analysis, the most significant effects were observed in genes involved in methionine metabolism, response to drug, transcription factor activity, and mitochondrion functions. Additional analyses indicated that many genes involved in lipid metabolism were also affected. The observed response of lipid metabolism genes is in agreement with the known hypolipidemic properties of pterostilbene mediated through the activation of PPARalpha. The induction of a large number of mitochondrial genes by pterostilbene is consistent with its previously-demonstrated role in apoptosis in human cancer cells.Our data also show that pterostilbene has a significant effect on methionine metabolism, perhaps resulting in the depletion of methionine by the inhibition of methionine biosynthesis. The effect of pterostilbene on methionine metabolism has not been previously observed and merits further investigation.”

The effects on methionine might be of particular interest, as methionine metabolism has also been linked to aging.
Does this possibly mean that resveratrol and its analogs enhance, e.g. C. elegans, lifespan by modulating methionine levels? PubMed, at least, does not provide a sufficient answer….