Large-scale functional genomic analysis of sporulation and meiosis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

We have used a single-gene deletion mutant bank to identify the genes required for meiosis and sporulation among 4323 nonessential Saccharomyces cerevisiae annotated open reading frames (ORFs). Three hundred thirty-four sporulation-essential genes were identified, including 78 novel ORFs and 115 known genes without previously described sporulation defects in the comprehensive Saccharomyces Genome (SGD) or Yeast Proteome (YPD) phenotype databases. We have further divided the uncharacterized sporulation-essential genes into early, middle, and late stages of meiosis according to their requirement for IME1 induction and nuclear division. We believe this represents a nearly complete identification of the genes uniquely required for this complex cellular pathway. The set of genes identified in this phenotypic screen shows only limited overlap with those identified by expression-based studies.