We use the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model organism to take advantage of multiple experimental approaches including genetics, genomics and proteomics, biochemistry and cell biology.
Transcription is often synonymous with gene regulation.
However, many post-transcriptional processes also contribute to gene regulation. Of particular interest to us is mRNA degradation and the interplay between mRNA turnover and translation. Our work initially focused around the function of Xrn1p, a 5'-exoribonuclease of yeast that is responsible for much of the cytoplasmic RNA turnover. A genetic screen based on XRN1 identified a number of different genes that genetically interact with XRN1. These genes fell into three classes.