KCS

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a yeast strain used for making wine and bread. Since it is a model organism for the study of eucaryotes, its genome has been fully sequenced that there are 16 chromosomes and a mitochondrial genome. However, a couple of previous studies reported that they found more sequences from mitochondrial DNA that was not previously sequenced. In addition, some other studies showed that mitochondrial DNA did not have the same size by using single DNA molecule experiment. Thus far, it is not clear how mitochondrial DNAs are different from each other in a yeast cell. Here we present their difference by using single molecule DNA analysis such as Optical Mapping, in which whole mitochondrial genomic DNAs are elongated and immobilized on the positively charged surfaces within a microfluidic device and digested by restriction enzyme such as EagI. Restriction enzyme digested barcode-like DNA patterns provides the information how mitochondrial genomic DNAs are different from each other.