Fission yeast living mitosis visualized by GFP-tagged gene products.

The fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe has been used as a model organism to study cell cycle control and dynamic chromosome behavior during anaphase segregation as genetic and cytological approaches are easily amenable. To understand the role of gene products involved in these cellular events, it is important to determine intracellular localization of each gene product during the cell cycle. In this article, visualization in living cells of several gene products involved in cell cycle control and sister chromatid separation is described. The genes tagged with jellyfish green fluorescent protein (GFP) include sad1(+) (encoding a spindle pole body (SPB) protein), atb2(+) (alpha-tubulin), mis6(+) (a kinetochore protein), eat1(+) (a novel actin-like protein localized in the nucleus) and cdc13(+) (a mitotic cyclin). In addition, LacI which is bound to a DNA segment containing LacO repeat sequences integrated near the centromere (cen1) is visualized. These are useful to monitor cell cycle events in living cells.