ABSTRACT
Since antiquity, yeast has been domesticated unwittingly or purposefully for the conversion of grape juice into wine by a process called fermentation. In the 18th century, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1734-1794) showed that sugar in grape juice was transformed into ethanol during fermentation. Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) and Charles Cagniard-Latour (1777-1859) microscopically examined fermentation mixtures and advanced the view that the “force” that drove fermentation is “a mass of globules that reproduces by budding” and is a consequence of the growth of yeast-an idea that was quickly rejected by the inšuential German chemist Justus von Liebig, who maintained that the murkiness in fermenting liquid was not due to a living organism. Based on controlled experiments, chemical analyses of broth, and microscopic examinations of the sediment from successful and “diseased” fermentation vats, the versatile French scientist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) concluded that yeast cells did not spontaneously arise from fermenting liquid but from preexisting cells. He identiœed yeast as the causative agent of alcoholic fermentation. The brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has today become a supermodel-“an organism that reveals and integrates many diverse biological œndings applying to most living things” (Davis, 2003). A number of investigators, in approximately 700 laboratories around the world, have joined hands to make this fungus (though rather atypical) a model of all model organisms. Its advantages for the study of physiology and eukaryotic gene functions are:
In his Nobel lecture, Leland H. Hartwell tells how Saccharomyces cerevisiae was pivotal to his life in science: “My research career has been motivated by a desire to understand cancer. Each time I have identiœed an intriguing aspect of the cancer problem, I have found that it could be approached more effectively in the simpler eukaryotic cell, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, than the human cell” (Hartwell, 2002). This chapter gives some remarkable examples of yeast in the study of biological processes in the eukaryotes and the likely further developments.
