Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment Commons^™

Survival Percentage And Outgrowth Collection Kit (Spock) Development And Usage To Analyze Targets Of The Transcription Factor Gcn4 For Their Impact On Chronological Lifespan In The Model Organism S. Cerevisiae, Daniel Paul Felker

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Plate reader-based methods for high-throughput measurement of growth rate, cellular survival, and chronological lifespan are a compelling addition to the already powerful toolbox of budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae genetics. These methods have overcome many of the limits of traditional yeast biology techniques, but also present a new bottleneck at the point of data-analysis. Herein, we describe SPOCK (Survival Percentage and Outgrowth Collection Kit), an R-based package for the analysis of data created by high-throughput plate reader based methods. This package allows for the determination of chronological lifespan, cellular growth rate, and survival in an efficient, robust, and reproducible fashion. To …