Initially thought to be an inert chemical substrate, yeast has transformed from a simple ingredient to the subject of a complex field of industrial and biomedical research. The field of yeast research has grown and flourished, multiplying in size and training many talented researchers. They have led the way in collaborative science, sharing knowledge and reagents.
Many breakthroughs in the cell cycle, cancer genetics, and metabolism have come from the humble yeast, and those who study it. What role will yeast play in the future of research? What do we have to learn from the unique, collaborative nature of yeast researchers? What can the history of yeast research teach us about discoveries yet to come? We hope to address all of these questions and more during this meeting on the history of yeast research.
This unique meeting covering the history of yeast research to the latest developments has been preserved and is available for your immediate viewing. PROGRAM contains session topics and links to the full length video and slides of talks presented. PROFILES contains biographies of the people in the field who presented. PARTICIPANTS lists those who attended and their institutions. PHOTOS contain hundreds of candid photos taken during the meeting.
Yeast was used by the throughout the ancient world to ferment beer and bread. It took until the 1860s for Louis Pasteur to discover how yeast plays a key role in alcoholic fermentation despite the fact that it had been used as an agent of fermentation for centuries. Yeast are eukaryotes, as are humans. They are easily grown and manipulated within a laboratory setting, making them an outstanding model organism for the study of genetics and cell biology.
The genome of the first yeast species sequenced, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, was completed in 1996. Since then more than 1000 isolates of S. cerevisiae have been completely sequenced and 50 species of yeast have been sequenced as well. Yeast share many genes with humans, including many that are involved in cancer, and in nearly every essential cellular process, such as mitosis, meiosis, DNA replication, recombination, and repair, RNA synthesis and processing, and protein transport and degradation. A broad network of researchers has developed a wide array of techniques for studying yeast. Yeast can also be used in the development of new drugs and therapeutics.
ChromoShake, is a three-dimensional simulator design to find the thermodynamically favored states for chromosome geometries. The simulator was applied to the budding yeast centromere. The spindle pole bodies (red disks) and kinetochore microtubules (green rods) depict a metaphase configuration. The colored strands represent the centromere regions of the 16 chromosomes. The centromere chromatin is shown under initial conditions. Cohesin (white rings) is radially displaced from the spindle axis. (Image: Josh Lawrimore, Joeph K. Aicher, Patrick Hahn, Alyona Fulp, Ben Kompa, Leandra Vicci, Michael Falvo, Russell M. Taylor II and Kerry Bloom. Mol. Biol. Cell (2016) 27:153-166.)
This meeting is the nineth in a series organized by the CSHL Meeting and Courses Program together with CSHL Center for Humanities Studies of Modern Biology: Culture, History, Art, and Humanity.
We have invited speakers who made many of the seminal discoveries that began the field, as well as those who are working in the field now. We also invite historians who have examined the scientific and societal context of the field. Like the previous meetings in the series, this meeting will provide an excellent opportunity to look in depth at a topic and to share the stories that are often missing from academic accounts.
Previous meetings in the series include: