Braithwaite, Natalie Emma (2011) Functional genomics and signalling in invasive growth of Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Doctoral thesis (DPhil), University of Sussex.

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Abstract

Schizosaccharomyces pombe is a unicellular organism which has been shown to
undergo invasive filamentous growth under nitrogen deprived conditions. Through the
completion of a genome-wide screen of S. pombe deletion mutants this invasive growth
form has been separated into three stages: adhesion, invasion, filament formation. The
filament formation of each deletion strain was analysed resulting in the classification of
mutants into four morphologically aberrant groups: (Ia) strains that were unable to form
filamentous protrusions, (Ib) strains that had thickened rope structures of their
filamentous protrusions, (IIa) strains that had elongated cells in their filaments and (IIb)
strains that had erratic structure of cells in their filaments. The screen also identified
strains that exhibited altered levels of invasion efficiency. These were classified as
hypo-invasive, poorly-invasive or hyper-invasive. Class Ia strains were selected for
further analysis as they represent the tertiary stage of invasion, filament formation. To
attempt to identify the signalling pathways involved in this stage, potential signalling
compounds were added to growth media and any alteration in phenotypes were noted.
cAMP, iron and calcineurin were all analysed for their roles in the tertiary stage of
invasion. The non-invasive and poorly-invasive strains were also tested with these
signalling compounds to attempt to elucidate their role in the secondary stage of
invasive growth. Finally the role of spindle pole bodies (SPB) was analysed during
filament formation. The SPB duplicates in late G1/S phase and in single cells the new
SPB migrates to either cell end (new or old) in an un-biased pattern. Using GFP tagged
SPB markers, the segregation pattern in filaments was analysed followed by creation of
deletion mutant/SPB-GFP-tagged hybrids to attempt to elucidate the control of SPB
segregation in filaments.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Schools and Departments:	School of Life Sciences > Biochemistry
Subjects:	Q Science > QD Chemistry > QD0241 Organic chemistry > QD0415 Biochemistry
Depositing User:	Library Cataloguing
Date Deposited:	18 Jan 2012 16:25
Last Modified:	24 Aug 2015 15:24
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/7668

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