Articles tagged Yeast
(45 results)

When a group of microorganisms needs to stick together, they build a biofilm. The cells cement themselves together onto a surface, forming durable structures that are notoriously hard to remove. In a medical setting, biofilms can contribute to dangerous antibiotic resistance. In the August issue of G3, Cromie et al. use a yeast model to…

As in real estate, so in cell biology: location is key. Knowing where a protein localizes in a cell gives insight into its function, and new research published in G3 describes a method to accurately identify a protein’s subcellular localization through high-throughput microscopy and machine learning. To determine a protein’s subcellular localization, researchers can tag…

Two highly similar genes that contribute to drug resistance in a pathogenic yeast have been co-evolving as tandem duplicates for the past 134 million years—while maintaining distinct functions. This is the conclusion of a paper in the April issue of GENETICS by Lamping et al. that examines the evolutionary effects of ectopic gene conversion. Evolutionary…

Restricting calorie intake seems to promote longer lives in a wide range of organisms, from microbes to mammals. Some determined youth-seekers are already adopting reduced-calorie diets in an attempt to extend their lifespans. But it’s not clear yet that these anti-aging effects apply to humans, and the mechanisms by which they work in other organisms…

One of the last places you’d expect to find a charged amino acid residue is buried within the hydrophobic interior of a lipid bilayer. And for the most part, this expectation holds true: portions of proteins that span membranes are typically composed of hydrophobic residues. But in some cases, the positively charged residues lysine and…

Deep within a tumor, sequestered from an adequate blood supply, a cancer cell grows and multiplies. Far beneath Earth’s surface, a microbe lives and thrives in similarly low-oxygen conditions. Generally, oxygen depletion causes serious distress to aerobic organisms—what allows these life forms to survive? The cellular response to hypoxia is massive. Hypoxia alters the expression…

To the unaided eye, Antarctic soil and alpine glaciers may appear to be barren wastelands devoid of life. But some microbes call hostile habitats like these home. Research on one such organism, published in the latest issue of G3, reveals some of the mechanisms behind cold adaptation—and explains why these otherwise hardy creatures can’t survive…

Cancer profoundly scars the genome of an affected cell. Amplification and overexpression of chunks of DNA sequence are common—but it’s not always clear whether these changes are directly involved in the disease or byproducts of some other malfunction. Further complicating the search for treatments, many genes that are altered in cancer cells are involved in…

In the late 1980s, Japanese biologist Yoshimori Ohsumi finally got to run a lab of his own and began casting around for a suitable topic to occupy himself and his new grad students. At 43 years old, he did not consider himself much of a scientific success; he was now hoping to corner a niche of biology…

“This is the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer. Because it’s very difficult to eliminate multiple genes from a cell . . . we decided early on that we had to take a synthetic route—even though nobody had been there before—to see if we could synthesize the…

Model Organism Databases (MODs) and the Gene Ontology Consortium play a crucial “behind-the-scenes” role in the work of model organism geneticists and many other biomedical researchers. This guest post by the newly-formed Alliance of Genome Resources announces the group’s intention to integrate the efforts of the MODs and other genome resources. You can learn more…