Yeast has brought a lot of joy into the world, but its evolutionary origins were unclear until scientists did a worldwide genomic survey of the humble organism. Based on the genetic diversity of strains found in China, they concluded that its origin is almost certainly in that part of the world.
It's easy to find brewer's yeast and various strains that cause maladies, but the breakthrough involved sending researchers out into China's primeval forests to collect samples.
Large-scale population genomic surveys are essential to explore the phenotypic diversity of natural populations. Here we report the whole-genome sequencing and phenotyping of 1,011 Saccharomyces cerevisiae isolates, which together provide an accurate evolutionary picture of the genomic variants that shape the species-wide phenotypic landscape of this yeast. Genomic analyses support a single 'out-of-China' origin for this species, followed by several independent domestication events. Although domesticated isolates exhibit high variation in ploidy, aneuploidy and genome content, genome evolution in wild isolates is mainly driven by the accumulation of single nucleotide polymorphisms.
Fun fact: the same is true for all organisms. African humans have the greatest genetic diversity, indicating that humanity emerged from that continent.
• Genome evolution across 1,011 Saccharomyces cerevisiae isolates (via The Atlantic)
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