Cauliflower mosaic virus promoters direct efficient expression of a bacterial G418 resistance gene in Schizosaccharomyces pombe.

A system is presented for transformation of the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe to resistance against the antibiotic G418. The bacterial resistance gene of the transposon Tn5 is expressed under the control of promoters and transcription terminators from cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV). The promoter of the S. pombe alcohol dehydrogenase gene has also been used. Transformants can be selected directly on medium containing G418 (up to 1 mg/ml) due to inactivation of G418 by the Tn5 gene product, the aminoglycoside 3'-phosphotransferase (II). The plant viral promoter 35S confers higher resistance to G418 than the 19S promoter. This corresponds to the relative strengths of these promoters in plant cells. The strong plant promoter 35S yields resistance comparable to that obtained with the strong S. pombe promoter from the alcohol dehydrogenase gene. The constructions with the two plant promoters have been used on multicopy shuttle plasmids that replicate autonomously in S. pombe and Escherichia coli. In addition the 35S and the 19S constructions have been inserted into the S. pombe genome where they confer G418 resistance as single copy genes. Since vector sequences are excluded in this case, all the necessary signals for expression of G418 resistance are contained within the DNA fragments containing the plant promoters, the resistance gene and the plant terminators. This transformation system is independent of S. pombe mutants. It may be useful for the transformation of other lower eukaryotes. The activity of the CaMV promoters in S. pombe may be exploited for the expression of plant genes in fission yeast.