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A pseudohyphal mutant of the yeast Cryptococcus neoformans. Cell walls are stained blue with calcofluor white, and nuclei are stained with sytox green. Wild-type strains grow as spherical cells that bud from the parent. Mutation of any of five components in a conserved pathway (here a serine/threonine protein kinase homologue encoded by CBK1) causes C. neoformans to produce elongated cells that do not separate efficiently from the parent. C. neoformans is a human pathogenic fungus in the phylum Basidiomycota and thus is highly diverged from budding yeasts like Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The same pathway of genes identified in C. neoformans regulates both conserved and divergent phenotypes in S. cerevisiae and animal cells. See the full article by Walton et al. on p. 3768 in this issue of MBC. (Image: Felicia J. Walton, Duke University, Durham, NC)

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