The Yeast Sacchromyces Cerevisiae

The yeast Sacchromyces cerevisiae, S. cerevisiae, has had a role in identifying many genes over the past few decades. Yeast is important to biology and humans overall because we can determine how the replication of yeast is the same as other multicellular eukaryotes, such as humans. Yeast has provided a lot of useful information on dietary restrictions in both yeast and mammals. Studies show that dietary restriction, that is nutrient deficient without starvation or malnutrition lessens the amount of aging of the yeast cells. This can be potentially useful to humans by decreasing the amount of glucose a cell receives to lessen the effects of aging. (Longo, 2012). This yeast is widely used in experiments because culturing yeast is easy to culture.

It is used in many labs and only requires the DNA in question, primers that anneal to the beginning and end of the target genes, Thermus aquaticus, Taq DNA, a heat stable DNA polymerase and all four of the deoxyribonucleate triphosphates. There are three steps in the PCR reaction denaturation, hybridization and DNA synthesis. During these steps the DNA is separated or denatured into two strands, hybridized, where the two single strands are complimentary paired to the respective primers, and then the DNA is synthesized with Taq DNA. This is considered one cycle, and it can commonly take 50 cycles to amplify enough DNA to be used. When the PCR is completed a gel electrophoresis is run. The PCR product is put in a specially formed agarose gel that will allow electricity to flow around the gel and DNA and force the DNA to travel down the gel resulting in white bands depending on their electronegativity. When the DNA is transformed from plasmid into the yeast we use salmon sperm to protect the nucleus from becoming degraded and the plasmid lost. This increases the efficiency of the DNA because the sperm DNA will adhere to the yeast cell wall and allow the plasmid to bind to the

Hydrogen peroxide is an oxidizing agent. If the bacteria cannot break down this oxygen barrier it will not grow. It kills bacteria that cannot decompose hydrogen peroxide. If you interrupt the TSA-1 gene it would lead to the yeast being sensitive to hydrogen peroxide. We then noticed that this gene did not grow, it was knocked out on hydrogen peroxide which indicates the gene is involved in the function of hydrogen peroxide. An important takeaway from this experiment is that the protein must be involved in protein folding, an experiment that can not be done in an undergraduate genetics