A series of promoters for constitutive expression of heterologous genes in fission yeast

Abstract

Inducible/repressible promoters are useful for the maintenance of toxic genes or timely expression. For ectopic expression of cloned genes in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, the thiamine-regulatable nmt1 promoter has been widely used, since the transcriptional activity of this promoter can be controlled by thiamine. However, this property sometimes limits a certain type of research, since the expression inevitably requires cells to be cultivated under the conditions that induce promoter activation. To allow constitutive expression of heterologous genes, we cloned three promoters of cam1+, tif51+ and ef1a-c+. Construction of a series of vectors comprising these promoters and their introduction into the fission yeast cells demonstrated that the activity was different among these promoters but was not affected by cultured media commonly used in fission yeast. Therefore, a promoter with appropriate strength would be selectable from these promoters, depending on the genes to be expressed.