A Life with Yeast Molecular Biology - Prof. Dr. Horst Feldmann

300
H. FELDMANN
prove our findings in the homologous system. In order to be able
to identify and quantitate transcripts from an individual gene,
Robert Krieg and Rolf Stucka synthesized a unique ‘‘artificial
tRNA gene’’ (SYN2): it was tagged by an intron-like sequence
that could not be spliced out from its long precursor but otherwise
behaved like resident tRNA genes [91]. This gene combined with
various Ty constructs and integrated as a single copy each into
the yeast genome was used to monitor the transcriptional
interference between Ty (and segments thereof) and a flanking
tRNA gene as well as the chromatin conformation of the
stable transcription complex and its flanking regions [91,92].
Figure 4 shows a photograph of my collaborators involved in this
work at a birthday trip in 1988.
We observed that there is a modest stimulatory effect (like in
the majority of regulatory systems in yeast) of Ty or LTR
insertions upstream of a tRNA gene on its expression in vivo.
Transcriptional interference between Ty1 insertions and two
POL III-transcribed genes was later also shown in the cases of
Fig. 4. People of my lab crew around 1988: Gertrud Mannhaupt, Hans
Lochmüller, Susanne Mitzel, Robert Krieg, Rolf Stucka, Christa Schwarzlose,
and Uschi Obermeier.