Question on creating knockouts - (Sep/05/2013 )

Hallo all, I am reading about knockouts and the use of them to study genes. However I do not understand the following sentence: "In fungi such as the human pathogen, Candida albicans , which is constitutively diploid and lacks a full sexual cycle, gene knockouts can be problematic and time consuming" What do they mean? I can understand that working with diploid organisms is difficult because if you knock out 1 gene, there is always the other (copy) gene (since its a diploid, 2 copies). But why is the lack of a complete sexual cycle a problem? Normally its an advantage to have a non sexual cycle (no meiosis). And this meiosis is not present in C. albicans. So I am a bit confused.

You can't do back crosses, or work with the haploid strain.

phage434 on Thu Sep 5 16:07:00 2013 said:

You can't do back crosses, or work with the haploid strain.

Ok, the haploid strain, I understand.

But the backcross?
How do you mean?

I can understand they do a backcross in animals or plants to get an animal/plant that contains the same genetic material as the parent + the new gene.

But they also do backcrosses with yeast/fungi?