Dynamic Live Cell Imaging of Budding Yeast Meiosis

For over a century, major advances in understanding meiosis have come from the use of microscopy-based methods. Studies using the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, have made important contributions to our understanding of meiosis because of the facility with which budding yeast can be manipulated as a genetic model organism. In contrast, imaging-based approaches with budding yeast have been constrained by the small size of its chromosomes. The advent of advances in fluorescent chromosome tagging techniques has made it possible to use yeast more effectively for imaging-based approaches as well. This protocol describes live cell imaging methods that can be used to monitor chromosome movements throughout meiosis in living yeast cells.