Fission Yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe: A Unicellular “Micromammal” Model Organism

Abstract

The fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe is a rod-shaped unicellular eukaryote, well known for its contributions as a model organism for our understanding of regulation and conservation of the eukaryotic cell cycle. As a yeast divergent from the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, S. pombe shares more common features with humans including gene structures, chromatin dynamics, and the prevalence of introns, as well as the control of gene expression through pre-mRNA splicing, epigenetic gene silencing, and RNAi pathways. With the advent of new methodologies for research, S. pombe has become an increasingly used model to investigate various molecular and cellular processes over the last 50 years. Also, S. pombe serves as an excellent system for undergraduate students to obtain hands-on research experience. Versatile experimental approaches are amenable using the fission yeast system due to its relative ease of maintenance, its inherent cellular properties, its power in classic and molecular genetics, and its feasibility in genomics and proteomics analyses. This article provides an overview of S. pombe's rise as a valuable model organism and presents examples to highlight the significance of S. pombe as a unicellular "micromammal" in investigating biological questions. We especially focus on the advantages of and the advancements in using fission yeast for studying biological processes that are characteristic of metazoans to decipher the underlining molecular mechanisms fundamental to all eukaryotes.

Acrylamide-Derived Ionome, Metabolic, and Cell Cycle Alterations Are Alleviated by Ascorbic Acid in the Fission Yeast

“…Additionally, its genome contains protein-coding genes responsible for cell division and cellular organization, which are also found in the genome of higher eukaryotes. Hence, it became a popular model system to study the basic principles of a cell that can be used to understand more complex organisms [21,22]. The eukaryotic mitotic cell cycle is a highly complex event that guarantees duplication and faithful segregation of all components required for cell survival to daughter cells.…”

Use of a Fission Yeast Platform to Identify and Characterize Small Molecule PDE Inhibitors

“…Ironically, S. pombe cells expressing PDE5, the target of erectile dysfunction drugs, and grown in the presence of cGMP dramatically elongate upon exposure to BC76 ( Demirbas et al, 2011b ), as PKA activity regulates the length of cells required to trigger mitosis ( Table 1 ) ( Navarro and Nurse, 2012 ; Mudge et al, 2014 ). No wonder S. pombe is sometimes referred to as a unicellular micromammal ( Vyas et al, 2021 )!…”

“…As this volume is devoted to immune regulation and inflammation, a discussion of PDEs from parasitic organisms may seem somewhat off topic, however the immune system and inflammation are intrinsically involved in infectious disease. Previously, we expressed in S. pombe PDE4, PDE8, and PDE11 family members from the blood fluke Schistosoma mansoni , whose genome includes members of all 11 Class I PDE families ( Vyas et al, 2021 ). 5FOA growth assays were used to determine the relative ability of these enzymes to hydrolyze cAMP and cGMP as shown by an increase in amount of exogenous cNMP required to confer 5FOA R growth ( Munday et al, 2020 ).…”

A high-quality reference genome for the fission yeastSchizosaccharomyces osmophilus

“…There are five currently recognized species of fission yeasts: S. pombe, S. japonicus, S. octosporus, S. cryophilus, and S. osmophilus (Helston et al 2010;Vaughan-Martini and Martini 2011;Brysch-Herzberg et al 2019). S. pombe was adopted for biological research more than 70 years ago (Leupold 1950;Fantes and Hoffman 2016), and is one of the most prominent model organisms (Hoffman et al 2015;Hayles and Nurse 2018;Vyas et al 2021). In the last decade, S. japonicus has emerged as a powerful new experimental model for biologists, especially those interested in evolutionary cell biology (Klar 2013;Aoki et al 2017;Rutherford et al 2022).…”