You have just read a paper that the addition of caffeine to cells disrupts the D

Question

You have just read a paper that the addition of caffeine to cells disrupts the DNA damage checkpoint and you would like to understand why. By searching for proteins that bind to caffeine, you isolate a protein, Caf1. You believe that Caf1 is involved in the DNA damage checkpoint because when you delete Caf1 from yeast cells and add a drug that causes DNA damage, the cells fail to arrest in the cell cycle. You give your Caf1-deleted cells to an undergraduate in the laboratory and ask him to take care of the strain for you while you take the weekend off to celebrate your finding. Upon your return, you find the poor undergraduate in tears. He explains that he thinks that he messed up the Caf1 mutant strain while you were gone because after growing Caf1 and wild-type cells in rich media and examining them during mitosis, Caf1 mutants looked the same as wild-type cells. Are you concerned about the undergraduate student’s findings? Why? (10 points)

Explanation / Answer

I don't think so, because the caf-1 mutants can undergo mitosis in the absence of caffeine on rich medium with slow growth rate. Caf-1 mutants are caffeine sensitive as well as temperature-sensitive. So that if they are messed we can easily discriminate them by growing them in either caffeine medium or allowed to grow at 39oC. So that by examining the mitosis, we cannot say whether they are messed up or not. The cellular phenotypes would look like same in both caf-1 and wild-type, in such cases we need to perform above mentioned experiments like growing them in either caffeine medium or at 39oC.

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