Cells of the budding yeast, S. cerevisiae, have for several decades now been considered as the prototypic eukaryotic cells, ideally suited to study and uncover many of the basic phenomena of eukaryotic life. This is because of the unrivaled ease and speed of genetic and molecular genetic analysis in yeast, the small genome size (12 Mbp), the short doubling time (80 min on complex media), a fully developed system of sexual reproduction with stable haploid as well as diploid phases enabling complementation as well as recombination analysis (Dickinson and Schweizer 2004; Stansfield and Stark 2007)
