Domestication reprogrammed the budding yeast life cycle

Matteo De Chiara; Benjamin Barré; Karl Persson; Amadi Onyetuga Chioma; Agurtzane Irizar; Joseph Schacherer; Jonas Warringer; Gianni Liti

Domestication of the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, dates back over 9000 years, with the earliest use in rice, honey and fruit fermentation 6 . Subsequent domestication for industrial or semi-industrial beer, dairy, rice, cocoa, coffee 7 , bread, palm sap and agave fermentation 8 transformed wild yeast lineages into specialized domesticated breeds [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] . Lab domestication and the subsequent use of budding yeast as a model organism resulted from efforts to breed pure, industrial beer strains 16 . Modern lab strains are genetic mosaics with genomes composed of DNA from diverse domesticated origins 17 . The continued existence of wild yeast not spoiled by extensive gene flow from feral domesticated yeast became accepted only recently 18, 19 . Wild strains are more diverse in terms of single nucleotide variation; domesticated lineages are instead distinguished by genome content variation in form of aneuploidies, polyploidies and the copy number of individual genes and chromosome segments [20] [21] [22] [23] . These structural and copy number variants in domesticated lineages may explain the high phenotypic variation among domesticated lineages and the unexpectedly large intraspecies phenotypic diversity in the species 9, 20, 21, 24 .