Isolation of an essential Schizosaccharomyces pombe gene, prp31(+), that links splicing and meiosis

We carried out a screen for mutants that arrest prior to premeiotic S phase . One of the strains we isolated contains a temperature-sensitive allele mu tation in the fission yeast prp31(+) gene. The prp31-E1 mutant is defective in vegetative cell growth and in meiotic progression. It is synthetically lethal with prp6 and displays a pre-mRNA splicing defect at the restrictive temperature. We cloned the wild-type gene by complementation of the temper ature-sensitive mutant phenotype. Prp31p is closely related to human and bu dding yeast PRP31 homologs and is likely to function as a general splicing factor in both vegetative growth and sexual differentiation.