This book on the molecular gearings of fission yeast is cordially dedicated to Carsten Bresch, Michi Egel-Mitani, Herbert Gutz, Paul Nurse, Amar Klar, and Urs Leupold. With these candid personalities - all influential to the casting of my pro fessional and private career - I had the good fortune of sharing coauthorship at very significant steps towards developing a sensible touch for the subtle charm of this wonderful model organism (Bresch et al. 1968; Egel and Egel-Mitani 1974; Egel and Gutz 1981; Beach et al. 1982; Egel et al. 1984; Leupold et al. 1989). As to the timing of the book, repeated queries from participants at our Copenha gen EMBO courses on Molecular Genetics with the Fission Yeast Schizosaccharo myces pombe have indicated that a collective treatise on this subject would be highly welcome. This initial impression was overwhelmingly confirmed by the en thusiastic consent I met among the prospective authors when I first approached them on specific contributions to present their field of expertise - as well as by the encouraging support expressed by the Springer-Verlag crew. A notable prede cessor of this treatise, "The first attempt to assemble the lore of fission yeast" (Nasim et al. 1989), roughly coincided with the pioneering breakthrough of link ing the major cyclin-dependent kinase of fission yeast to cell cycle timing in gen eral - later awarded by the Nobel Prize to Paul Nurse.

1 Fission Yeast in General Genetics

2 The Genome and Beyond
3 Protein Kinases Driving the Cell Cycle
4 Checkpoint Controls Halting the Cell Cycle
5 Stress Responses in S. pombe
6 DNA Replication in S. pombe
7 DNA Repair Pathways
8 The Retrotransposons of S. pombe
9 Mating-Type Cassettes: Structure, Switching and Silencing
10 Centromere and Kinetochore Structure and Function
11 Chromosome Cohesion and Segregation
12 Telomere Organization and Nuclear Movements
13 The Mitotic Spindle and Genome Segregation
14 The Fission Yeast Actomyosin Cytoskeleton
15 Regulation of Cytokinesis
16 Control of Cell Polarity and Morphogenesis in Fission Yeast
17 Cell Wall Synthesis
18 Mating-Type Control and Differentiation
19 Initiation of Meiosis
20 Control of Late Meiosis and Ascospore Formation
21 RNA Polymerases and Accessory Factors
22 Core Promoters in S. pombe: TATA and HomolD Boxes
23 Mechanism and Control of Pre-mRNA Splicing
24 Transcription Termination
25 Ubiquitin-Dependent Proteolysis by the Proteasome
26 Processing Proteases in S. pombe
27 Protein Glycosylation
28 Mitochondrial Genetics in a Petite-Negative Yeast
29 Fission Yeast Phylogenesis and Evolution.