This Career Advancement Award is providing Dr. Bertani with an introduction to the genetic and molecular biological techniques necessary to work with the fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe. This organism can be easily cultured and manipulated like a bacterium, yet it resembles higher eukaryotes in the regulation of cellular processes like cell division and transcription. Gene amplification is being studied with the intention of describing the initial events that deregulate normal cellular controls and allow gene amplification to occur at a relatively high frequency. %%% Gene amplification has been demonstrated in animal cells, but it has been difficult to determine what happens in the earliest stages of that process. Schizosaccharomyces pombe is a fission yeast that has a wealth of already described mutations affecting many different cellular processes, and studies of gene amplification in this organism should provide insight into how it occurs in animals.
