Use of sulfite resistance in Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a dominant selectable marker

Two S. cerevisiae genes were found to exhibit dominant phenotypes useful for selecting transformants of industrial and laboratory strains of S. cerevisiae. FZF1-4, which confers sulfite resistance, was originally isolated and identified as RSU1-4, but the two genes are shown here to be allelic. Cysteine 57 in wild-type Fzf1p was found to be replaced by tyrosine in Fzf1-4p. Multicopy SSU1, which also confers sulfite resistance, was found to be somewhat less efficient. In both cases, a period of outgrowth in non-selective medium following transformation was found to be necessary. The number of transformants obtained was found to be strain-dependent, and also to depend on the sulfite concentration used during selection. Undesirable background growth of non-transformants was not observed at cell densities as high as 2.5 × 10⁷/plate. In two ura3 laboratory strains where selection for URA3 was applied independently of that for sulfite, the transformation efficiency for sulfite resistance was about 50% that for uracil prototrophy. Received: 1 July / 9 August 1999