Schizosaccharomyces pombe articles from across Nature Portfolio

An essential gene may become non-essential when another gene is mutated. Here, the authors investigate this type of digenic interaction, termed ‘bypass of essentiality’, in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, and show that bypassable essential genes are common and share certain features.

Cell shape is determined by a combination of biochemical regulation and mechanical forces. By imaging the dynamic behaviour of growth regulatory proteins in fission yeast and integrating these data within a mechanical model, Abenza et al. find that exocytosis plays a dominant role in shaping growth domains.

The evolutionarily conserved MTREC complex promotes degradation of meiotic mRNAs and regulatory ncRNAs. Here the authors show that MTREC also targets cryptic unstable transcripts and unspliced pre-mRNAs for degradation by the nuclear exosome, while the TRAMP complex has only a minor role in this process.

Genome-wide single-gene deletion libraries can be important tools for understanding the molecular workings of an organism, but have only been created for a single eukaryotic species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Now, Kim et al. present a second collection of deletion mutants that covers 98.4% of the genes of Schizosaccharomyces pombe, allowing a systematic comparison of gene essentiality and knockout phenotypes between two eukaryotic species.