Why study yeast?
Yeast is an extremely
powerful experimental system for studying what goes on inside
eukaryotic cells. Experiments can be done using yeast that just
can't be done with other organisms.
Yeast
cells are eukaryotic
cells. This means that many of the mechanisms that allow yeast
to be alive (use energy, grow, replicate, communicate) are shared with
all eukaryotic cells, including
animal cells and
plant cells. Thus, what
we learn about yeast can often help us know more about other eukaryotes
as well. For example, the
2001
Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to yeast geneticist Lee
Hartwell for his discoveries of how the cell division cycle is
regulated.
Yeast cells can replicate
in 90 minutes. This means that millions of copies of a single cell
can be obtained in several days. This makes it possible to search for
rare, but informative,
genetic
variants among millions and millions of individuals.
Genetic
manipulation of yeast cells allows powerful experiments to be
performed that can reveal important information about how cells work.
The entire DNA sequence of the
yeast genome is known. Consequently, there is a vast array of
tools and resources available for studying yeast genetics and cell
biology. Because of the experimental advantages of yeast, much of what
we know about the core eukaryotic
cellular
mechanisms have been learned in yeast. For example, many of the
genes found in the
human
genome project were able to be identified and named because their
yeast counterpart had already been studied.