Cytokinesis Defects in Budding Yeast

Budding yeast are a very good research organism, because they are similar to humans in many ways. One of the research opportunities with budding yeast is that there are many genes that are uncharacterized, and it is not known what their cellular function is or what their functional role is. There are also many genes that are affected by phosphorylation, one such gene is HOF1. Hof1 is phosphorylated during mitosis and results have shown that a Hof1 mutant without a PEST domain affects Hof1-GFP dynamics during cytokinesis. It has also been shown that deletion of the PEST domain may prevent phosphorylation of Hof1 (Blondel et al., 2005). Cytokinesis is the division of a cell into two daughter cells. Our research lab is interested in cytokinesis, because cytokinesis defects can lead to polyploidy in the cell. This defect can lead to cancer or cell death