UniProt release 15.2

Fission yeast: the third eukaryotic complete proteome in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot

Schizosaccharomyces pombe, the fission yeast, was isolated in 1893 by P. Lindner from East African millet beer, for which it was named, 'pombe' meaning 'beer' in Swahili. The genus name reflects both its relationship to budding yeast (-saccharomyces), and the most striking feature that distinguishes it from other yeast species, i.e. reproduction by fission (Schizo-). Although both S.pombe and Saccharomyces cerevisiae are yeasts, they are genetically as divergent from each other as both are from man. Unlike S.cerevisiae, S.pombe did not acquire its fame for its beer making talents - beer made with S.pombe seems to have quite a unsavoury acidic taste - but for the great scientific achievements its study permitted.

As mentioned above, fission yeast divides not by budding, but by medial fission, a process that resembles higher eukaryotic cell division. The organism grows exclusively through its cell tips and divides upon reaching the appropriate size, producing 2 daughter cells of equal sizes. Thus a simple measure of its length gives an estimate of which cell cycle phase the cell is in. This approach allows the isolation of cell cycle mutants (cdc), based on the presence of elongated cells due to continuous cell growth in the absence of cell division. This feature makes S.pombe a first-rate model organism to study cell division. The characterization of cdc mutants led to the discovery of cyclin-dependent kinases which was eventually awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

In 2002, S.pombe was the 6th eukaryotic organism to have its genome fully sequenced. As of this release, it is the 3rd eukaryotic organism, after S.cerevisiae and Homo sapiens, for which the complete proteome is available in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot. This set represents 4'957 manually curated protein sequence entries, containing data from the scientific literature and numerous cross-references, including links to GeneDB_Spombe, the fission yeast community database. A list of all S.pombe UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot entries is available in the pombe.txt file.

The S.pombe proteome we provide today is not a static one. We will keep revisiting and updating the entries as the science develops further. Analysis of S. pombe and S.cerevisiae proteins, coupled with phylogenetic studies, will allow the identification and annotation of homologous proteins in other organisms.

UniProtKB News

Cross-references to OMA

Cross-references have been added to the OMA project. The OMA project is a massive cross-comparison of complete genomes to identify the evolutionary relation between any pair of proteins. The main features of OMA are the large number of genomes from all kingdoms of life, the strict verification of orthology assignments and the determination of the phylogenetic relationship between any two proteins.

OMA is available at http://www.omabrowser.org/.

The format of the explicit links in the flat file is:

P39899:
DR   OMA; P39899; YANTHIA.

Q9Y6C2:
DR   OMA; Q9Y6C2; EGLENKP.

Changes concerning keywords

New keyword:

• Congenital generalized lipodystrophy

Changes in subcellular location controlled vocabulary

New subcellular locations:

• Host phagosome
• Host phagosome membrane
• Host presynaptic cell membrane
• Host synapse

New subcellular topology:

• GPI-like-anchor