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Three species of fission yeast

Fission yeast is an essential model for studying how cells grow and divide and for untangling the mysteries of chromosomes, but, in terms of efforts to read out its DNA, it has lagged behind budding yeast, a distant cousin on the fungal tree of life. Budding yeast is more familiar to most people – it is used in making beer and baking bread – and has been studied much more extensively, but fission yeast is biologically more complex and more similar to animals, including humans, in many important cellular ways.

Drug resistance is a well-known problem associated with treatment of malaria, a disease caused by the mosquito parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Despite this history, researchers knew little about the genetic influences leading to drug resistance. In a first of its kind study, researchers from the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard and the Harvard University School of Public Health proved that a newly identified gene mutation in the parasite’s genome leads to drug resistance to many anti-malarial drugs.