fob1 budding yeast rDNA maintenance

Fob1 is a DNA binding protein that was shown to be important for the maintenance of rDNA copy number. However, fob1 strain does not show clear deleterious phenotype and rather the replicative lifespan of the strain is longer than WT.In order to understand biological significance of Fob1, we knocked out Fob1 in budding yeast and cultured the strain for 900 generations. We hypothesized that fob1 strain can be subject to accumulation of mutations in the rDNA region because the homologous recombination rate should be much lower in fob1 strain. To test this hypothesis, we sequenced the rDNA region of fob1 strain.