15Every organism has a different set of genes essential for its viability. This indicates that an 16 organism can become tolerant to the loss of an essential gene under certain circumstances during 17 evolution, via the manifestation of 'masked' alternative mechanisms. In our quest to 18 systematically uncover masked mechanisms in eukaryotic cells, we developed an extragenic 19 suppressor screening method using haploid spores deleted of an essential gene in the fission yeast 20 Schizosaccharomyces pombe. We screened for the 'bypass' suppressors of lethality of 92 21 randomly selected genes that are essential for viability in standard laboratory culture conditions.
22Remarkably, extragenic mutations bypassed the essentiality of as many as 20 genes (22%), 15 of 23 which have not been previously reported. Half of the bypass-suppressible genes were involved in 24 mitochondria function; we also identified multiple genes regulating RNA processing. 18 25 suppressible genes were conserved in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but 13 of them 26 were non-essential in that species. These trends are consistent with a recent independent 27 bypass-of-essentiality (BOE) screening of 142 fission yeast genes conducted with more elaborate 28 methodology (Li et al., 2019). Thus, our study reinforces the emerging view that BOE is not a rare 29 event and that each organism may be endowed with secondary or backup mechanisms that can 30 substitute for primary mechanisms in various biological processes. Furthermore, the robustness of 31 our simple spore-based methodology paves the way for genome-scale BOE screening. 32 33