Control of gene expression by artificial introns in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Abstract

Artificial yeast introns that show cold-sensitive splicing have been constructed. These conditional introns can be inserted into a target gene as an "intron cassette" without disrupting the coding information, allowing expression of the gene to be cold sensitive. Insertion of these intron cassettes rendered the yeast URA3 gene cold sensitive in its expression. The advantage of this intron-mediated control system is that any gene can be converted to a controllable gene by simple insertion of an intron.