By Jason Stajich, on September 14th, 2009
A nice series of comparative genomics articles have been published in the last few weeks. The pace of genome sequencing has accelerated to the point that we have lots of sequencing projects coming from individual labs and small consortia not necessarily from genome centers. We are seeing a preview of what next (2nd) generation [...]
By Jason Stajich, on August 11th, 2009
There is an article in Wine Spectator (Seen on the JGI feed) on sequencing the wine spoilage yeast bruxellensis (correct name is now Dekkera bruxellensis) which adds the not-so-excellent taste of “sweaty horse” to wines. There is already some survey sequencing done by Ken Wolfe and Jurge Piskur’s groups so a full genome sequencing project will [...]
By Jason Stajich, on March 1st, 2009

I cheered the Sanger-Wellcome SGRP group work to generate multiple Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. paradoxus strain genome sequences. They submitted a version of the manuscript to Nature precedings and it is now published in Nature AOP showing that submitting to a preprint server doesn’t necessarily hurt your manuscript getting published in this instance. The research groups explored the impact of domestication (as was also recently done for the sake and soy sauce worker fungus, Aspergillus oryzae) on the Saccharomyces genome by comparing individuals from wild strains of S. [...]
By Jason Stajich, on December 26th, 2008
A recent paper in MBE presents evidence that the Taphrinomycota (containing S. pombe and Pneumocystis) are in fact a monophyletic group. This is considered an early branch in the Ascomycota with the Pezizomycotina (filamentous ascomycete fungi like Neurospora and Aspergillus) and Saccharomycotina (fungi mainly with yeast forms including Candida and Saccharomyces). The monophyly of Taphrinomyoctina fungi is something that has been fairly accepted but there are a few publications reporting conflicting evidence in some sets gene trees. This conflict is most likely due to Long Branch Attraction (LBA) and the Philippe lab has long worked on this problem of LBA working to develop tools like PhyloBayes that attempt to correct for LBA with a parameter rich model and using lots of data (like whole [...]
By Jason Stajich, on September 11th, 2008
Some tasty research if you are of the set who enjoy a good pint of beer. GenomeWebNews reports on study in Genome Research by Barbara Dunn and Gavin Sherlock at Stanford, looking at the history of lager yeast Saccharomyces [...]
By Jason Stajich, on May 6th, 2008
The transcriptional landscape of yeast has been (further) defined with [[Solexa]] sequencing in a method deemed “RNA-Seq”, but what I would call “deep EST sequencing”. This approach for transcriptional profiling by sequencing alone is sure to be used by many labs looking for lower and more complete ways to describe and quantitate the full population of transcripts in an [...]
By Jason Stajich, on April 9th, 2008

We may have to reevaluate whether Saccharomyces cerevisiae alone is the species used to brew beer. A paper from Gonzalez et al describes results from PCR-RFLP comparison of 24 brewing strains identifies evidence for S. cerevisiae x S. kudriavzevii hybrids. Although this hybridization is not unprecedented, most seem to be related to cultivated brewing or [...]
By Jason Stajich, on February 21st, 2008
David Carter at the Sanger Centre emailed a message that new assemblies of Saccharomyces strain resequencing project have been posted including a new three-way alignment of S. bayanus-S.paradoxus-S.cerevisiae. This updates the Dec 2007 [...]
By Jason Stajich, on December 19th, 2007
I’ve paraphrased an email sent by David Carter to folks interested in Saccharomyces resequencing project.
The latest version of the SGRP data is on the web site and ftp site. This release is somewhat provisional, and motivated more by the fact that we have a paper deadline coming up than by any claim to finality. It should be [...]
By Jason Stajich, on November 20th, 2007
While many strains of S. cerevisiae are being sequenced, a single strain, YJM789, isolated from the lung of an AIDS patient was sequenced a few years ago at Stanford and published this summer. The genome was described in a paper entitled “Genome sequencing and comparative analysis of Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain YJM789″.