Humanized Yeast Models

Dear Colleagues,

Unicellular eukaryotes, like budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, are consolidated models in basic research. Their genetic tractability and ease of manipulation pushed these microorganisms to a leading position in the post-genomic era, providing key information on the molecular mechanisms that govern conserved cellular modules, pathways and functions, like metabolism, cell division, signaling, vesicle traffic, cytoskeleton, aging, autophagy, etc. Furthermore, the human proteins expressed in these models are often capable of supporting the function or their yeast counterparts. Thus, heterologous expression in yeast is a powerful strategy to address the structure–function relationship in human gene products that may either stand as important drug targets or relate to pathological syndromes.

In the last two decades, multiple humanized yeast models have been developed with various purposes, either by complementing yeast mutants with human genes or by implementing functions or pathways in yeast that are naturally missing in lower eukaryotes. The formation of amyloid bodies or prion fibrils like those produced in neurons in degenerative disorders, the biosynthetic pathway of cholesterol, or oncogenic signaling pathways, to mention some examples, have been successfully reproduced in yeast. In these systems, the yeast cell provides an “in vivo test tube” that allows us to study the behavior of human proteins in the absence of other input characteristic of higher cells, but yet within a cellular environment. Typically, humanized yeast models can be exploited to design bioassays for pharmacological screens in drug discovery or to carry out exhaustive mutational analyses in order to assess protein–protein interactions, mechanistic features of enzymes or diverse functional aspects of the target proteins.

This Special Issue will cover research on the design, implementation or exploitation of yeast-based models to study human proteins, based on their heterologous expression coupled to the genetic versatility of yeast models, with emphasis on those strategies aimed at basic or applied research into genes and proteins related to human pathologies. We encourage researchers working in the field to contribute with original research or review articles.

Prof. Victor J. Cid
Prof. Faustino Mollinedo
Guest Editors

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• Heterologous expression
• Saccharomyces cerevisiae
• Cell signaling
• Apoptosis
• Aging
• Cancer
• Drug discovery
• Protein–protein interactions
• Microbial models