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.