https://www.cas.cn/cm/202607/t20260716_5115714.shtml

https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(26)00624-0

A team led by Zhou Jinqiu, a researcher at the CAS Center of Excellence for Molecular Cell Science, used the single-celled eukaryotic organism baker’s yeast as a model and constructed the first eukaryotic cell without a ‘spliceosome intron’.

The study showed that although ‘introns’ and the ‘spliceosome’ are not essential for the survival of eukaryotic cells, losing all introns slows down cell growth.

Previous research has shown that when eukaryotic cells read genetic information, they generally need to cut out segments that don’t code for proteins and splice together the useful segments, which are then processed into mature messenger RNA. These removed segments are called ‘introns,’ while the molecular machinery responsible for cutting them out is called the ‘spliceosome.’

Zhou Jinqiu’s team designed a ‘divide-and-conquer, recombination assembly’ intron deletion strategy. They deleted different ‘introns’ in haploid cells of different mating types; then, through chromosome recombination and meiosis in diploid cells, they combined all the deletions into a single cell. This method shortened the originally planned 12-year deletion process to 6 years.

The researchers eventually obtained well-surviving, genome-reduced baker’s yeast strains with a single chromosome.