What are the advantages to using yeast as a model system, in general and/or for cell cycle studies in particular? What are some limitations?

Model System: Yeast

1. What are the advantages of using yeast as a model system, in general and/or for cell cycle studies in particular? What are some limitations?

 Even though yeast is among the basic eukaryotic creatures, it has many of the same cellular mechanisms as humans. It is thus an important species to comprehend to obtain a better knowledge of the human body's basic molecular processes. (Neilson, 2019). Yeast is an excellent model organism for studying human biology and illness.

Advantages of using yeast as a model system

Some of the advantages include that genetic manipulation in yeast is straightforward and inexpensive compared to standard work in more sophisticated species such as rats and fish. (Neilson, 2019). Another benefit is that yeast analogs exist for roughly 20% of genetic mutations with known disease activities. It demonstrates that diseases like Alzheimer's are caused by biochemical processes that are far too fundamental to be tampered with. Gene mutations involved in the yeast cell cycle, for example, can cause cancer in humans (Wilson, 2021). The third benefit is that yeast is used to test new drugs because it has certain genes connected with humans. Thousands of drugs are tested on mutated yeast cells and human genes to see if they can help them return to normal (Wilson, 2021). There is a lot of documented and well-known genetic information about yeast, and there are specific systems biology tools and resources for it, which make a researcher's life a lot easier.

Limitations of using yeast as a model

Some of the limitations of using yeast as a model system include equivalent proteins having organism-specific activities and may not work in the same way in different kinds of animals (Duan et al., 2019). Another disadvantage is that various species' cells reside in distinct habitats. The third limitation is that certain yeast enzymes are absent from other Eukaryotes. It does, however, have microorganism-like characteristics, such as the capacity to take communicate and share plasmids, the ease with which genetic alterations can be made, differential growth under different conditions, and the ability to use fluorescent-based high-throughput measuring techniques.

The yeast cell life cycle 

1 Budding

2. conjugation

3. spore

(Image)

 References

Duan, S. F., Shi, J. Y., Yin, Q., Zhang, R. P., Han, P. J., Wang, Q. M., & Bai, F. Y. (2019). The reverse evolution of a classic gene network in yeast offers a competitive advantage. Current Biology, 29(7), 1126-1136.

Nielsen, J. (2019). Yeast systems biology: model organism and cell factory. Biotechnology Journal, 14(9), 1800421.

Wilson, A. C., & Morgan, W. R. (2021). Functional analysis of a Phytophthora host-translocated effector using the yeast model system. PeerJ, 9, e12576.

Yeast. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved April 6, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeast