EVOGENE seminar: David Peris Navarro - The rise of the yeast genus Saccharomyces: biodiversity and evolution

In the last two decades, the application of new molecular techniques has helped to unravel the diversity of Saccharomyces species, a group of eukaryotic microbial organisms, from the Ascomycete phylum, important for their multitude of industrial applications. Through this seminar, we will walkthrough the worldwide isolation and the genome sequencing of more than two thousand Saccharomyces strains. As the isolation methods have been improved, new species have been described, one of them revolutionizing an important alcoholic beverage, the lager beer. The large collection of Saccharomyces strains is helping to describe the phylogeography and the mechanisms of adaptation to wild and industrial environments. As we continue isolating yeast strains, the Saccharomyces genus will rise as a model to understand the evolution of other microbial organisms as well as multicellular organisms.