Silence is golden. A pioneering genetic analysis of aging in yeast has revealed that a protein complex known to play an essential role in transcriptional silencing at mating-type loci and telomeres also controls aging and stress resistance

1995

REP.G0768

Yeast cells, like the rest of us, get old and die. Baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, divides by budding and thus produces two celearly distinguishable cells upon division - the cell that buds being known as the 'mother' cell and the bud its 'daughter' cell. In addition to being larger in size than its newly-born daughter, a haploid mother cell has the unique ability to change mating type - which can be a or alpha - by a directed gene conversion event that utilizes 'silent' copies of mating-type information (see Fig.1). The number of cell divisions - budding events - that a mother cell undergoes before its cell cycle stops is limited, however, and defines a measure of senescence for this organism. This number turns out to be relatively constant for a given strain, but varies considerably from strain to strain (from ~15-40 divisions).

v.5(8):822-825, CURRENT BIOLOGY

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