An unprecedented comparison of hundreds of species of Yeasts has helped geneticists brew up an expansive picture of their evolution over the last hundreds of millions of years, including an analysis of the way they evolved individual appetites for particular food sources that may be a boon to biofuels research.
A team of researchers led by labs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Vanderbilt University sequenced and compared the genomes of 332 species of budding yeasts, all members of a subphylum of yeasts that multiply by producing daughter cells from buds on their surface. More than 200 of the Yeast types had their genomes catalogued for the first time for the study, which was published today (Nov. 8, 2018) by the journal Cell.
Even in an era of big-data comparisons of DNA -- when studies often involve analyzing the genes of many people or many fruit flies at a time -- the yeast study is a step into new territory.
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Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle, Pharmaceutical Microbiology
