Clinical Microbiology and Yeast Congress

Yeast Epigenetics

Yeast provides a flexible and rapid genetic system for studying cellular events. With an approximate generation time of 90 min, colonies containing millions of cells are produced after just 2 d of growth. In addition, yeast can propagate in both haploid and diploid forms, greatly facilitating genetic analysis. Like bacteria, haploid yeast cells can be mutated to produce specific nutritional requirements or auxotrophic genetic phenotypes, and recessive lethal mutations can either be maintained in haploids as conditional lethal alleles (e.g., temperature-sensitive mutants), or in heterozygotic diploids, which carry both wild-type and mutant alleles.