Abstract
The power of Saccharomyces cerevisiae as an experimental organism derives from its genetic tractability. Mutant variants can be isolated or constructed and phenotypically characterized with relative ease. In addition, the ability to recover and characterize all four products of meiosis, as haploid spores in a tetrad ascus, greatly facilitates determining the allelic composition of variants, measuring linkage relationships between alleles, and constructing new allele combinations for the analysis of genetic interactions. Saccharomyces cerevisiae also is a preeminent model organism for the study of meiotic recombination, by analysis of tetrads, by analysis of populations of single spores (often called random spore analysis), and by direct monitoring of recombination at the DNA level. This chapter contains methods for tetrad dissection, for random spore preparation, and for preparing DNA for molecular analysis from liquid cultures undergoing synchronous meiosis.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Winzeler EA, Shoemaker DD, Astromoff A et al (1999) Functional characterization of the S. cerevisiae genome by gene deletion and parallel analysis. Science 285:901–906
Gresham D, Ruderfer DM, Pratt SC et al (2006) Genome-wide detection of polymorphisms at nucleotide resolution with a single DNA microarray. Science 311:1932–1936
Neiman AM (2011) Sporulation in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Genetics 189:737–765
Morin A, Moores AW, Sacher M (2009) Dissection of Saccharomyces cerevisiae asci. J Vis Exp 27:e1146
Singer Instruments – Cerevisiae dissection video, singerinstruments.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=164&Itemid=975
Perkins DD (1949) Biochemical mutants in the smut fungus Ustilago maydis. Genetics 34:607–626
Fogel S, Mortimer R, Lusnak K et al (1979) Meiotic gene conversion: a signal of the basic recombination event in yeast. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol 43(Pt 2):1325–1341
Papazian HP (1952) The analysis of tetrad data. Genetics 37:175–188
Saccharomyces Genome Database (2013) www.yeastgenome.org
Borts RH, Lichten M, Hearn M et al (1984) Physical monitoring of meiotic recombination in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol 49:67–76
Oh SD, Jessop L, Lao JP et al (2009) Stabilization and electrophoretic analysis of meiotic recombination intermediates in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Methods Mol Biol 557:209–234
Stahl Lab Online Tools, molbio.uoregon.edu/~fstahl/
Jessop L, Allers T, Lichten M (2005) Infrequent co-conversion of markers flanking a meiotic recombination initiation site in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Genetics 169:1353–1367
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Intramural Research Program at the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. I thank Hardeep Kaur for images used in the figures and Robert Shroff for comments on the manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Lichten, M. (2014). Tetrad, Random Spore, and Molecular Analysis of Meiotic Segregation and Recombination. In: Smith, J., Burke, D. (eds) Yeast Genetics. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1205. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1363-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1363-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-1362-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-1363-3
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols