Saccharomyces castellii: A new model organism for telomere research

Abstract: Telomeres are natural ends of eukaryotic chromosomes and perform a major role in cell biology. They protect chromosomes from degradation, fusions and the end replication problem. To study telomeres different model organisms are used including a number of yeast species. In this work I present a new species in yeast telomere studies – Saccharomyces castellii. This yeast exhibits a lot of interesting features that makes this species one of the most promising models for future telomere research. Thus, this work was focused on developing and optimization of genetic assays and tools to make telomere research possible in S. castellii. We analyzed a number of basic tools and assays that are already used for Saccharomyces cerevisiae research and found that these tools can be directly applied to study S. castellii genetics. Furthermore, using our newly developed assays we analyzed the structure and properties of S. castellii telomeric 3’ overhangs and found that S. castellii exhibits not only short but also a fraction of long 3’ overhangs. In summary, we found that S. castellii is a new promising model organism for different studies and especially for telomere biology.