An MBoC Favorite: Morphological classification of the yeast vacuolar protein-sorting mutants: evidence for a prevacuolar compartment in class E vps mutants

In celebration of MBoC's first 20 years, members of the Editorial Board, members of the ASCB Council, and others comment on their favorite MBoC papers from the past two decades.

A brilliant illustration of the power of combining yeast genetics and simple cell biology can be found in this article (more than 500 citations). Twenty years ago, many yeast vacuolar protein-sorting (vps) mutants had already been identified using classical genetics. They had been grouped into three phenotypic categories (A, B, and C), depending on their vacuolar occurrence and size. Stevens and coworkers systematically reanalyzed the known vps mutants after immunolabeling two membrane-bound vacuolar proteins (Raymond et al., 1992). This led them to identify new vps mutant classes, including vps class E, in which just one of their two markers accumulated in a new compartment close to the vacuole. Later studies exploring the connection between the 13 class E VPS genes they identified led to the discovery that 11 of them code for subunits of the endosomal sorting complexes required for transport (ESCRT), which are required for protein sorting to multivesicular bodies, in a process conserved from yeast to humans.

A PDF file of the paper discussed above is attached to this article.