Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The microbial workhorse of industry and science

Commonly known as baker's or brewer's yeast, the fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a single-celled eukaryotic micro-organism. It reproduces asexually by a process known as budding, where a small bud forms on a single cell and develops into a fully-formed clone of the parent cell. Yeast has a remarkable diversity of applications in industry and research, as listed below:

• Food/drink industry: Yeast is very useful in industry because it makes carbon dioxide and alcohol as byproducts of fermentation. It is used in breadmaking 🥖 (where yeast releases CO₂ to make fluffy hole-filled bread), alcohol brewing 🍺🍷 (beer and wine, too!), and chocolate making 🍫 (to ferment cocoa beans).
• Biofuel production: Yeast is used to ferment corn 🌽 as a feedstock in bioethanol production.
• Research science: Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a model organism for the study of several topics in cell and molecular biology 🧬 due to its relative simplicity compared to complex eukaryotes and quick growth times. Many of our insights into the workings of the cell are based on studies on yeast 🔬.

Learn more about yeast on Wikipedia

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