Volume 1, Issue 1
Page 12
YEAST CAN LIVE WITH HUMAN GENES
By Harshika Gunawardena
For billions of years yeast and humans have been
evolving along separately+ A new study demonstrates
that this fungus is having the capability to survive with
human genes+ After inserting more than 400 genes
into yeast cells one at a time, researchers found out
that 50* of the genes functioned and enabled the
fungi to survive+
According to evolutionary Biologist Matthew Hahn of
Indian University, Bloomington, the same gene can
perform the same function after 1 billion years of divergence+ Scientists are aware that humans share
molecular similarities with microbes, something
which is helpful in making bread and beer where microbial function is necessary+
Yeasts carry genes that coordinate or arrange the growth of new
blood vessels in vertebrates, but they are single-celled and
bloodless+ In yeast these genes help cells to respond to stress+
How yeast and human genes do the same thing? To find out this
Biologists Edward Marcotte of University of Texas with his team
started working on this+ Next question was that what distinguishes
the replaceable genes+
They evaluated more
than 100 possible influences from the length of
the gene to the abundance of its protein+ But
it didn’t indicate whether
human genes have the possibility to stand in for a yeast gene+
Instead of that they found when a bunch of genes work closely
together, either most of them will be replaced or most of them
aren’t+
The team showed that only yeast equipped with human genes
could survive not that they were strong or full of energy and
could compete with unaltered strains+ Some researchers have
challenged that comparable genes in different organisms have
the same function+
But according to Marcottes’s these researchers may cause further ways to control and make use of yeast
for research+
Individual genes of human are being studied by inserting them into yeast cells+ Where scientists could
also transplant groups of interacting genes, which can create more human like yeast that will be more
useful for study of new drugs+
That Humans sleep 1/3 of their life