Even yeast get stressed. The environmental stress response of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast used for wine-, beer-, and bread-making and model organisms in the lab, has been well studied. But whether its stress responses are unique to this species of yeast, or common in all yeast was not known. Christian Brion and colleagues in the lab of Joseph Schacherer at the University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, France, compared yeast species responses to a variety of stresses. They found that some changes in gene expression were related to differences in species lifestyle, which allowed them to analyze how adaptation to stress evolved among the species. Their data also allowed them to propose potential biological functions for 42% of stress genes and note 301 genes without identifiable functions. Published in MBoC.
