Spore killers in fungi are selfish genetic elements that distort Mendelian segregation in their
favor. It remains unclear how many species harbor them and how diverse their mechanisms
are. Here, we discover two spore killers from a natural isolate of the fission yeast
Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Both killers belong to the previously uncharacterized wtf
gene family with 25 members in the reference genome. These two killers act in strain-
background-independent and genome-location-independent manners to perturb the …