Center for Humanities History of Science Meetings

Yeast Research: Origins, Insights & Breakthroughs

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.

Meeting Topics

  • Early Influential Yeast Centers
  • Mitosis, Meiosis and Growth Controls
  • RNA Synthesis, Processing, Translation and Regulation
  • Gene Expression and Silencing
  • Protein Transport, Autophagy, Degradation and Signaling
  • Mitochondria, Metabolism and Aging
  • Medical and Industrial Uses of Yeast
  • DNA Replication, Recombination and Repair
  • Genomics and Evolution

See the Meeting Yourself

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: a simple organism that tells a larger story

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.

About the graphic

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.)


Previous History of Science Meetings

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:

Organizers

  • David Botstein, Calico Life Sciences
  • Rochelle Esposito, University of Chicago
  • Gerald Fink, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT
  • Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Speakers

  • Angelika Amon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Brenda Andrews, University of Toronto
  • Kirsten Benjamin, Amyris, Inc.
  • Douglas Bishop, University of Chicago
  • Kerry Bloom, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Charles Boone, University of Toronto
  • Bonita Brewer, University of Washington
  • James Broach, Penn State University
  • Judith Campbell, California Institute of Technology
  • Frederick Cross, The Rockefeller University
  • Ronald Davis, Stanford University
  • Trisha Davis, University of Washington
  • David Drubin, University of California, Berkeley
  • Bernard Dujon, Institut Pasteur, Paris
  • Maitreya Dunham, University of Washington
  • Stephen Elledge, HHMI / Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
  • Scott Emr, Cornell University
  • R.E. Esposito, The University of Chicago
  • Susan Ferro-Novick, University of California, San Diego
  • Gerald Fink, Whitehead Institute / MIT
  • Thomas Fox, Cornell University
  • Judith Frydman, Stanford University
  • David Garfinkel, University of Georgia
  • Daniel Gottschling, Calico Life Sciences
  • Michael Grunstein, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Christine Guthrie, University of California, San Francisco
  • James Haber, Brandeis University
  • Michael Hall, University of Basel
  • Philip Hieter, University of British Columbia
  • Alan Hinnebusch, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
  • Mark Hochstrasser, Yale University
  • Anita Hopper, Ohio State University
  • Alexander Johnson, University of California, San Francisco
  • Mark Johnston, University of Colorado
  • Scott Keeney, HHMI / Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
  • Morten C. Kielland-Brandt, Technical University of Denmark
  • Sue Klapholz, Impossible Foods
  • Nancy Kleckner, Harvard University
  • Richard Kolodner, University of California, San Diego
  • Douglas Koshland, UC Berkeley
  • Sujsan Liebman, University of Nevada
  • Edward Louis, University of Leicester
  • Hiten Madhani, University of California, San Francisco
  • Edward Marcotte, University of Texas at Austin
  • Danesh Moazed, Harvard Medical School / HHMI
  • Kim Nasmyth, University of Oxford
  • Maynard Olson, University of Washington
  • Thomas Petes, Duke University
  • Ludmila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  • John Pringle, Stanford University of School of Medicine
  • Rodney Rothstein, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
  • Randy Schekman, University of California, Berkeley
  • Nava Segev, University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Giora Simchen, The Hebrew University
  • Michael Snyder, Stanford University
  • Tim Stearns, Stanford University
  • Bruce Stillman, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  • Kevin Struhl, Harvard Medical School
  • Jeremy Thorner, University of California, Berkeley
  • Benjamin Tu, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
  • Bik Tye, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
  • Patrick Westfall, Zymergen, Inc.
  • Reed Wickner, National Institutes of Health
  • Fred Winston, Harvard Medical School
  • Kenneth Wolfe, University College Dublin
  • Bruce Stillman, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  • Virginia Zakian, Princeton University

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