Monitoring SPB biogenesis in fission yeast with high resolution and quantitative fluorescent microscopy

Like centrosomes, yeast spindle pole bodies (SPBs) undergo a tightly controlled duplication cycle in order to restrict their number to one or two per cell and promote the assembly of a bipolar spindle at mitotic entry. This conservative duplication cycle is tightly coordinated with cell cycle progression although the mechanisms that ensure this coordination remain largely unknown. In this chapter, we describe simple high resolution microscopy- and quantitative light microscopy-based methods that allow to monitor SPB biogenesis in fission yeast and may be useful to study the molecular pathways controlling the successive phases of the duplication cycle.