Abstract
Budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) are two popular model organisms for virus research. They are natural hosts for viruses as they carry their own indigenous viruses. Both yeasts have been used for studies of plant, animal and human viruses. Many positive sense (+) RNA viruses and some DNA viruses replicate with various levels in yeasts, thus allowing study of those viral activities during viral life cycle. Yeasts are single cell eukaryotic organisms. Hence, many of the fundamental cellular functions such as cell cycle regulation or programed cell death are highly conserved from yeasts to higher eukaryotes. Therefore, they are particularly suited to study the impact of those viral activities on related cellular activities during virus-host interactions. Yeasts present many unique advantages in virus research over high eukaryotes. Yeast cells are easy to maintain in the laboratory with relative short doubling time. They are non-biohazardous, genetically amendable with small genomes that permit genome-wide analysis of virologic and cellular functions. In this review, similarities and differences of these two yeasts are described. Studies of virologic activities such as viral translation, viral replication and genome-wide study of virus-cell interactions in yeasts are highlighted. Impacts of viral proteins on basic cellular functions such as cell cycle regulation and programed cell death are discussed. Potential applications of using yeasts as hosts to carry out functional analysis of small viral genome and to develop high throughput drug screening platform for the discovery of antiviral drugs are presented.
Highlights
The two prize winning yeasts Yeasts belong to the kingdom of fungi
Unlike the conventional cell cycle G2-M regulation, viral protein R (Vpr) induces cell cycle G2 arrest at least in part through a mechanism involving in a fission yeast kinase Srk1 and its human homologue MK2 [69]. These results suggest that Vpr might modulate cell cycle G2 transition through an alternative and possibly a novel cellular mechanism other than the classic mitotic checkpoints [63, 72, 155]
We present two human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) viral proteins (Vpr and PR) as examples to demonstrate how studies on virus-mediated yeast cell death and apoptosis were carried out in budding and fission yeast
Summary
The two prize winning yeasts Yeasts belong to the kingdom of fungi. The two most commonly used yeasts for virus research are budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe). It was awarded to a single scientist, Dr Yoshinori Ohsumi, for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy His groundbreaking studies illuminated by using budding yeast as a model on how cells governs this intracellular degradation pathway to balance the cellular live and death process in response to various genotoxic stresses including viral infections [6, 7]. Besides the RNA viruses, the genomes of multiple human papillomavirus (HPV) subtypes and bovine papillomavirus (BPV) type 1 can stably replicate in yeast in an E1 or E2independent manner as nuclear plasmids [25, 26] This HPV viral gene E1 is a helicase, and E2 is a transcriptional activator and plasmid maintenance factor.
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