Yeast mating: Getting close to membrane merger

Yeast mating: Getting close to membrane merger

The machinery that mediates membrane fusion during yeast mating has remained elusive. But now a post-genomics approach has provided a powerful wedge into this difficult problem: a pheromone-induced multimembrane spanning protein has been identified as a key part of the mating machine.

Getting Close without Touching

In this paper we study the Near-Gathering problem for a set of asynchronous, anonymous, oblivious and autonomous mobile robots with limited visibility moving in LookCompute-Move (LCM) cycles: In this problem, the robots have to get close enough to each other, so that every robot can see all the others, without touching (i.e., colliding) with any other robot. The importance of this problem might...

Plasma membrane polarization during mating in yeast cells

The yeast mating cell provides a simple paradigm for analyzing mechanisms underlying the generation of surface polarity. Endocytic recycling and slow diffusion on the plasma membrane were shown to facilitate polarized surface distribution of Snc1p (Valdez-Taubas, J., and H.R. Pelham. 2003. Curr. Biol. 13:1636-1640). Here, we found that polarization of Fus1p, a raft-associated type I transmembra...

Getting started with yeast.

Synchronous mating in yeast.

Homogeneous a and alpha unbudded yeast cells in logarithmic phase, grown in supplemented minimal medium and isolated by zonal gradient centrifugation, are used for mating. When these cells are resuspended in aerated defined medium, highly synchronous mating rapidly occurs. Within 20 min of incubation at 30 degrees early sexual pairing is evident; extensive agglutination is observed by 60 min, a...