First, a little history. Although there were earlier isolated papers about pombe, the modern experimental work stems from two people. The first was Urs Leupold who took up its genetics and published a long paper in 1950(l). He had various reasons for choosing pombe but an important one was that it is normally haploid in vegetative growth. I came along somewhat later and chose pombe as a good material for cell physiology and in particular for the analysis of growth during the cell cycle. It was a fairly large micro-organism which was easy to culture. It grew only in length, so volume calculations were simple and cells could be roughly positioned in the cell cycle by their length. It divided in two by a medial septum and did not have the unusual method of cell cycle growth which separates budding yeast from nearly all other cells. I did not choose it because it was a eukaryote since the distinction between eukaryotes and prokaryotes was not drawn until the early 60s.
Although there are now many excellent microphotographs of pombe, there is some historical interest in the diagram that I drew for my first substantial paper on pornbe(') in 1957 when I thought that pombe was a relatively unknown cell (Fig. 1). It shows the cell shape, the septum, and the division scars left by earlier septation. In the paper, I misnamed the septum as a 'cell plate' -an error which survived for many years in the literature. I also misnamed the nucleus as a 'central vacuole' but the nuclear arrangements in yeasts were controversial at the time.
Work on pombe has expanded greatly since these early papers and a mark of its 'coming of age' is the very