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. 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.
Fission yeast was isolated in 1893 by Lindner from East African beer. The species name is derived from the Swahili word for beer (Pombe).
The sequence of the S. pombe genome was published in 2002.
The fission yeast researcher Paul Nurse won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Lee Hartwell and Tim Hunt, for work on the cell cycle.
Comparison with budding yeast or S. cerevisiae
- S.c. has ~ 6200 orfs, Sch. pombe has ~ 5000 orfs
- S.c. has 16 chromosomes, Sch. pombe has 3
- S.c. can mate while Sch.pombe cannot
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