Genome-wide studies of telomere biology in budding yeast
Authors:Yaniv Harari and Martin Kupiec
doi: 10.15698/mic2014.01.132
Volume 1, pp. 70 to 80, published 01/03/2014.
Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv 69978, Israel.
Keywords:
yeast, telomeres, genome stability, cancer, aging, systems biology.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Please cite this article as:
Yaniv Harari and Martin Kupiec (2014). Genome-wide studies of telomere biology in budding yeast. Microbial Cell 1(3): 70-80.
© 2014 Harari and Kupiec. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
Telomeres are specialized DNA-protein structures at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. Telomeres are essential for chromosomal stability and integrity, as they prevent chromosome ends from being recognized as double strand breaks. In rapidly proliferating cells, telomeric DNA is synthesized by the enzyme telomerase, which copies a short template sequence within its own RNA moiety, thus helping to solve the “end-replication problem”, in which information is lost at the ends of chromosomes with each DNA replication cycle. The basic mechanisms of telomere length, structure and function maintenance are conserved among eukaryotes. Studies in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have been instrumental in deciphering the basic aspects of telomere biology. In the last decade, technical advances, such as the availability of mutant collections, have allowed carrying out systematic genome-wide screens for mutants affecting various aspects of telomere biology. In this review we summarize these efforts, and the insights that this Systems Biology approach has produced so far.