Survival of the filamentous

Organisms often have to ensure their survival during periods of unfavorable environmental conditions. Through the process of meiosis, budding yeast cells haploidize their genome and package it into environmentally resistant spores. In their publication in Cell, Joao Matos and his team discovered that metabolic enzymes essential for the recovery from spore dormancy form protein filaments during meiosis. In collaboration with the Pilhofer lab at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Matos and his team developed a novel workflow that combines the preparation of cell spreads with multimodal imaging that enabled the study of these filaments with unprecedented detail. The work implicates a previously unanticipated organization of proteins in the cell that permits long periods of dormancy.