Abstract
The yeasts S. cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe are non-pathogenic, prevalently haploid unicellular fungi that grow and form colonies on defined media. Both organisms have been for decades favoured objects of investigation, first by classical genetics and more recently by molecular techniques. Knowledge accumulated, specially over the last few years, has revealed that both yeasts, not only clarify mechanisms of genetic transmission (gene expression, mitosis and meiosis) and signal transduction common to higher eukaryotes but, unexpectedly, also illuminate many processes crucial to the development of multicellular organisms such as cell differentiation and cell-cell interactions. Many elements (proteins, cis acting elements) of the control circuits of the cell are conserved from yeast to mammals; remarkably, in many cases, yeast control elements can be replaced with elements of heterologous control circuits. It is thus possible to isolate genes from higher eukaryotes by complementation and to scrutinize their function by the powerful genetics now available in both yeasts.
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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Pulitzer, J.F., Pollice, A. (1993). Gene regulatory circuits in Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a tool for the identification of heterologous eukaryotic regulatory elements. In: Maresca, B., Kobayashi, G.S., Yamaguchi, H. (eds) Molecular Biology and its Application to Medical Mycology. NATO ASI Series, vol 69. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84625-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84625-0_10
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