Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Saccharomyces cerevisiae (S. cerevisiae) is a food-grade budding yeast with ‘generally regarded as safe’ status. It has been used in the production of fermentative foods (bread), beverages (beer, wine, spirits), and biofuels. It is also used as a cell factory for the production of pharmaceutical and other important biochemical compounds. Harnessed as a workhorse in the fermentation industry and a study model organism in the laboratory, the S. cerevisiae genome has been molded for millennia through different anthropogenic domestication events. The S. cerevisiae genome was the first eukaryotic genome to be sequenced (1996; and updated in 2010). A synthetic version (Sc2.0) of the genome of the BY lineage of the S288c reference strain is currently being constructed by a large-scale international Yeast 2.0 consortium and will be the world’s first synthetic eukaryotic genome (www.syntheticyeast.org). View Large Image Figure Viewer Download Hi-res image