Yeast: an experimental organism for 21st Century biology

Abstract

In this essay, we revisit the status of yeast as a model system for biology. We first summarize important contributions of yeast to eukaryotic biology that we anticipated in 1988 in our first article on the subject. We then describe transformative developments that we did not anticipate, most of which followed the publication of the complete genomic sequence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in 1996. In the intervening 23 years it appears to us that yeast has graduated from a position as the premier model for eukaryotic cell biology to become the pioneer organism that has facilitated the establishment of the entirely new fields of study called "functional genomics" and "systems biology." These new fields look beyond the functions of individual genes and proteins, focusing on how these interact and work together to determine the properties of living cells and organisms.

Figure 1

The synthetic gene array network as described by Costanzo et al. (2010) and analyzed and visualized by Baryshnikova et al. (2010). Each point represents a functional gene and each edge a functional connection, and the colored regions indicate subnetworks with similar GO process annotations.