Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a research tool for RNA-mediated human disease

The budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has been used for decades as a powerful genetic tool to study a broad spectrum of biological topics. With its ease of use, economic utility, well-studied genome, and a highly conserved proteome across eukaryotes, it has become one of the most used model organisms. Due to these advantages, it has been used to study an array of complex human diseases. From broad, complex pathological conditions such as aging and neurodegenerative disease to newer uses such as SARS-CoV-2, yeast continues to offer new insights into how cellular processes are affected by disease and how affected pathways might be targeted in therapeutic settings. At the same time, the roles of RNA and RNA-based processes have become increasingly prominent in the pathology of many of these same human diseases, and yeast has been utilized to investigate these mechanisms, from aberrant RNA-binding proteins in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to translation regulation in cancer. Here we review some of the important insights that yeast models have yielded into the molecular pathology of complex, RNA-based human diseases. This article is categorized under: RNA in Disease and Development > RNA in Disease.