BC6 Flashcards
What are the advantages of yeast as a model organism for the fundamental processes in eukaryotic cells?
- Cell cyle (incl. DNA replication, mitosis)
- Protein life cycle (transcription, translation, folding, sorting, degredation)
- Organelle structure and function
- cellular stress response (DNA/protein)
What are the limitation of yeast as a eukaryotic model organism?
- Small (less well suited for microscopy techniques)
- Contains cell wall (certain chemicals not taken up)
- No complex development processes (unicellular)
What are the two types of yeast in the lab, and what is a defining difference between them?
- Budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae)
- Daughter cell is produced through budding
- Fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe)
- Cell division occurs centrally
What are the kingdom and phylum of yeast?
Kingdom: Fungi
Phylum: Ascomycota
How long ago was S. cerevisiae and S. pombe common ancestor? With which animal is this a similar evolutionary distance?
- 109 years ago
- Humans
Why is the long evolutionary distance between the two yeasts and humans relevant to model organisms?
Because if a mechanism is conserved between the two yeasts, you will most likely find it in humans as well!
What are the advantages of S. pombe as a model organism over S. cerevisiae? Name 4 examples.
Certain aspects of cell biology are more similar to humans, such as:
- Splicing
- RNAi
- replication origins
- Centromeres
What are 2 advantages of S. cerevisiae as a model organism over S. pombe?
- More widely studied
- More experimental tools
What attributes make yeast a superior genetic model organism compared to other eukaryotes? What are its limitations?
Advantages:
- Cell cycle (includes DNA replication, mitosis)
- Protein life cycle (transcription, translation, folding, sorting, degredation)
- organelle structure and function
- cellular stress response (DNA/protein)
- grows quickly
- grows on solid and liquid media
- cultivation is simple and inexpensive
- genome small with simple structure
- high recombination rates
- high transformation rates
- haploid life cycle allows direct genotype phenotype relation
- crossings are easy
Disadvantages
- Small (less well suited for microscopy techniques)
- contains cell wall (certain chemicals not taken up)
- No complex development processes (unicellular)
What advantages arise from the haploid/diploid life cycle? How are crossings analyzed?
- genetic modification of 1 copy of gene is sufficient to investigate phenotype in haploids
- can use diploids for purpose of crossing two mutants or to propogate a heterozygote mutant under conditions where it does not display a phenotype.
- conjugation (mating) and meiosis (sporulation) can be easily induced experimentally.
Crossing analysis:
- tetrad analysis
- plate spores seperatley to test markers
- can also detect mating type by looking at mating type pheromone
What basic types of genetic interactions exist between two double mutants? How are these interactions interpreted?
- Additive/synergistic: different pathways
- epistatic: same pathway
- suppressive: two genes work in different pathways that negatively impact each other, or the suppressor lies upstream in the same pathway, and if absent the downstream part is less important.
How does the two-hybrid system work?
- basic two hybrid system (not a variation)
- have DNA binding domain (BD) attached to bait protein (X)
- have Activation domain (AD) attached to prey protein (Y)
- BD is bound to DNA upstream of reporter gene.
- If protein X and Protein Y, AD will get into proximity of BD, completing the transcription factor, and allowing transcription of the reporter gene.
Give the proper names for the following for your favorite gene 1:
- the gene
- the protein
- the mutant gene
- knock out/deletion
- a conditional allele
- YFG1 = the gene (your favorite gene 1) - italics
- Yfg1 = the protein - no italics
- yfg1 = the mutant protein - italics
- yfg1Δ = knock out/deletion - italics
- yfg1-1 = a conditional allele, more precise: yfg1=L64A
What is is the meaning in the budding yeast systematic name of:
YDR135w
Yeast (Y) - chromosome IV (D) - right arm (R) - 135th ORG (135) - Watson strand (w)
What are the following characteristics of S. cerevisiae?
- Shape
- size (haploid and diploid)
- Genome size (bp and chromosomes)
- How many genes and how many contain introns?
- usual chromosome type
- Tolerances
- Cell wall or not?
- Ovall shaped (with bud)
- 4 um (haploid), 5-6 um (diploid)
- 12 Mbp on 16 chromosomes
- 6400 genes, 4% contain introns
- usually diploid, but can also live as haploid
- wide range of tolerances
- 2.8-8.0 pH
- <3 M glucose
- <20% EtOH
- Has a cell wall
What are the following characteristics of S. pombe?
- Shape
- Size
- How many base pairs in genome on how many chromosomes?
- How many genes, and how many introns?
- Usual chromosome type
- other differences to S. cerevisiae
- Rod shaped
- size: 13x 3um (haploid), or 22x4 um (diploid)
- 13 Mbp on 3 chromosomes
- 5000 genes, 5000 introns
- usually haploid, but can have diploid cells which usually proceed directly to meiosis.
- has a longer G2 phase than S. cerevisiae.
Name the 3 types of allele and brief description
- Deletion allele: cpmplete lack of a gene
- Conditional allele: mutation that allows activation or deletion under specific conditions (eg. degron)
- Point mutation allele: mutation of one or several codons. May retain protein but induces a specific defect.
Name 4 cellular phenotypes
- growth
- survival
- subcellular localization
- cellular function (eg. DNA replication/splicing)
name 3 molecular phenotypes
- protein-protein interaction
- protein activity
- post translation modifications (PTM)
Draw a diagram depicting the budding yeast life cycle
Describe crossing
Done to generate a double mutant yeast strain. Basically crossing 2 single mutation strains to get a double mutation strain.
Describe conjugation/mating
spontaneous when both haploid strains are mixed.
In case of two strains, each with marker, diploid produced would be heterozygous for both markers.
describe Sporulation
Diploids will be grown and plated on sporulation medium.
Spores germinate, each giving rise to a colony.
Spore is haploid, essentially containing a chromatid, meaning that each colony is expressing a single chromatid.
List 6 genome wide approaches to genome analysis in yeast
- Gene expression: Micro-arrays (gene chip)
- Gene knockouts (barcoded deletion library)
- Protein overexpression
- protein localization (GFP)
- Protein-protein interaction (two-hybrid, affinity tag)
- protein purification