From beer to breadboards: yeast as a force for biological innovation

Abstract

The history of yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer’s or baker’s yeast, is intertwined with our own. Initially domesticated 8,000 years ago to provide sustenance to our ancestors, for the past 150 years, yeast has served as a model research subject and a platform for technology. In this review, we highlight many ways in which yeast has served to catalyze the fields of functional genomics, genome editing, gene–environment interaction investigation, proteomics, and bioinformatics—emphasizing how yeast has served as a catalyst for innovation. Several possible futures for this model organism in synthetic biology, drug personalization, and multi-omics research are also presented.