Yeast for virus research
Authors:Richard Yuqi Zhao
doi: 10.15698/mic2017.10.592
Volume 4, pp. 311 to 330, published 18/09/2017.
Department of Pathology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Global Health, and Institute of Human Virology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21201, USA.
Keywords:
Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, virus-host interaction, viral replication, cell cycle regulation, programed cell death, genome-wide analysis, high throughput drug screening.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The author declares no conflict of interests.
Please cite this article as:
Richard Yuqi Zhao (2017). Yeast for virus research. Microbial Cell 4(10): 311-330. doi: 10.15698/mic2017.10.592
© 2017 Zhao. 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:
Budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) are two popular model organisms for virus research. They are natural hosts for viruses as they carry their own indigenous viruses. Both yeasts have been used for studies of plant, animal and human viruses. Many positive sense (+) RNA viruses and some DNA viruses replicate with various levels in yeasts, thus allowing study of those viral activities during viral life cycle. Yeasts are single cell eukaryotic organisms. Hence, many of the fundamental cellular functions such as cell cycle regulation or programed cell death are highly conserved from yeasts to higher eukaryotes. Therefore, they are particularly suited to study the impact of those viral activities on related cellular activities during virus-host interactions. Yeasts present many unique advantages in virus research over high eukaryotes. Yeast cells are easy to maintain in the laboratory with relative short doubling time. They are non-biohazardous, genetically amendable with small genomes that permit genome-wide analysis of virologic and cellular functions. In this review, similarities and differences of these two yeasts are described. Studies of virologic activities such as viral translation, viral replication and genome-wide study of virus-cell interactions in yeasts are highlighted. Impacts of viral proteins on basic cellular functions such as cell cycle regulation and programed cell death are discussed. Potential applications of using yeasts as hosts to carry out functional analysis of small viral genome and to develop high throughput drug screening platform for the discovery of antiviral drugs are presented.