SHORT TECHNICAL REPORTS System of centromeric, episomal, and integrative vectors based on drug resistance markers for Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a widely used experimental system for basic research in cell biology. Numerous researchers use it because of the ease of genetic manipulations. Two different techniques are often used for genetic manipulations. One is the use of vectors such as the integrative, centromeric, and episomal plasmids of the pRS series (1,2) for gene cloning and the second is the use of drug resistance markers for the deletion or tagging of genes (3–13). The latter technique has the advantage of being independent of the presence of auxotrophic markers in the yeast background. The common vectors used for yeast manipulation lack this advantage. They rely on the presence of an appropriate auxotrophic marker. This led to the construction of so-called designer deletion strains to combine several auxotrophic markers into one single yeast strain (1,14,15). Due to experimental conditions, however, it is not always possible to use one of these yeast strains, or the experiment may require growth on rich media in which plasmid selection is not SHORT TECHNICAL REPORTS