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Schizosaccharomyces pombe, also called "fission yeast," is a species of yeast. It is used as a model organism in molecular and cell biology. It is a unicellular eukaryote, whose cells are rod-shaped. Cells typically measure 2 to 3 micrometres in diameter and 7 to 14 micrometres in length. These cells maintain their shape by growing exclusively through the cell tips and divide by medial fission to produce two daughter cells of equal sizes, which makes them a powerful tool in cell cycle research. Such research is critical as it is important to understand how cells grow and differentiate as well as how non-controlled growth results in cancerous cells. Fission yeast was isolated in 1893 by Lindner from East African millet beer. The species name is derived from the Swahili word for beer (Pombe). It was first developed as an experimental model for studying the cell cycle by Murdoch Mitchison in the 1950s. The fission yeast researcher Paul Nurse, together with Lee Hartwell and Tim Hunt, won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their work on cell cycle regulation. The sequence of the S.pombe genome was published in 2002, by a consortium led by the Sanger Institute, becoming the sixth model eukaryotic organism whose genome has been fully sequenced. This has fully unlocked the power of this organism, with many genes homologous to human disease genes, including diabetes and cystic fibrosis, being identified. S.pombe has also proved to be an important organisim for unlocking the secrets of the cell cycle response to DNA damage and DNA replication.
Comparison with budding yeast or Saccharomyces cerevisiae | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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