Saccharomyces cerevisiae—the most emblematic and industrially relevant yeast—has a long list of taxonomical synonyms. Formerly considered as distinct species, some of the synonyms represent variants with important industrial implications, like Saccharomyces boulardii or Saccharomyces diastaticus, but with an unclear status, especially among the fermentation industry, the biotechnology community and biologists not informed on taxonomic matters. Here, we use genomics to investigate a group of 45 reference strains (type strains) of former Saccharomyces species that are currently regarded as conspecific with S. cerevisiae. We show that these variants are distributed across the phylogenetic spectrum of domesticated lineages of S. cerevisiae, with emphasis on the most relevant technological groups, but absent in wild lineages. We analyzed the phylogeny of a representative and well-balanced dataset of S. cerevisiae genomes that deepened our current ecological and biogeographic assessment of wild populations and allowed the distinction, among wild populations, of those associated with low- or high-sugar natural environments. Some wild lineages from China were merged with wild lineages from other regions in Asia and in the New World, thus giving more resolution to the current model of expansion from Asia to the rest of the world. We reassessed several key domestication markers among the different domesticated populations. In some cases, we could trace their origin to wild reservoirs, while in other cases gene inactivation associated with domestication was also found in wild populations, thus suggesting that natural adaptation to sugar-rich environments predated domestication.

Soil yeasts represent a poorly known fraction of the soil microbiome due to limited ecological surveys. Here, we provide the first comprehensive inventory of cultivable soil yeasts in a Mediterranean ecosystem, which is the leading biodiversity hotspot for vascular plants and vertebrates in Europe. We isolated and identified soil yeasts from forested sites of Serra da Arrábida Natural Park (Portugal), representing the Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub biome. Both cultivation experiments and the subsequent species richness estimations suggest the highest species richness values reported to date, resulting in a total of 57 and 80 yeast taxa, respectively. These values far exceed those reported for other forest soils in Europe. Furthermore, we assessed the response of yeast diversity to microclimatic environmental factors in biotopes composed of the same plant species but showing a gradual change from humid broadleaf forests to dry maquis. We observed that forest properties constrained by precipitation level had strong impact on yeast diversity and on community structure and lower precipitation resulted in an increased number of rare species and decreased evenness values. In conclusion, the structure of soil yeast communities mirrors the environmental factors that affect aboveground phytocenoses, above ground biomass and plant projective cover.

The adaptation of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to man-made environments for the fermentation of foodstuffs and beverages illustrates the scientific, social, and economic relevance of microbe domestication. Here we address a yet unexplored aspect of S. cerevisiae domestication, that of the emergence of lineages harboring some domestication signatures but that do not fit completely in the archetype of a domesticated yeast, by studying S. cerevisiae strains associated with processed olives, namely table olives, olive brine, olive oil, and alpechin. We confirmed earlier observations that reported that the Olives population results from a hybridization between S. cerevisiae and S. paradoxus. We concluded that the olive hybrids form a monophyletic lineage and that the S. cerevisiae progenitor belonged to the wine population of this species. We propose that homoploid hybridization gave rise to a diploid hybrid genome, which subsequently underwent the loss of most of the S. paradoxus sub-genome. Such a massive loss of heterozygosity was probably driven by adaptation to the new niche. We observed that olive strains are more fit to grow and survive in olive brine than control S. cerevisiae wine strains and that they appear to be adapted to cope with the presence of NaCl in olive brine through expansion of copy number of ENA genes. We also investigated whether the S. paradoxus HXT alleles retained by the Olives population were likely to contribute to the observed superior ability of these strains to consume sugars in brine. Our experiments indicate that sugar consumption profiles in the presence of NaCl are different between members of the Olives and Wine populations and only when cells are cultivated in nutritional conditions that support adaptation of their proteome to the high salt environment, which suggests that the observed differences are due to a better overall fitness of olives strains in the presence of high NaCl concentrations. Although relic olive hybrids exhibit several characteristics of a domesticated lineage, tangible benefits to humans cannot be associated with their phenotypes. These strains can be seen as a case of adaptation without positive or negative consequences to humans, that we define as a quasi-domestication.

The study of microbe domestication has witnessed major advances that contribute to a better understanding of the emergence of artificially selected phenotypes and set the foundations of their rational improvement for biotechnology. Several features make Saccharomyces cerevisiae an ideal model for such a study, notably the availability of a catalogue of signatures of artificial selection and the extensive knowledge available on its biological processes. Here, we investigate with population and comparative genomics a set of strains used for cachaça fermentation, a Brazilian beverage based on the fermentation of sugar cane juice. We ask if the selective pressures posed by this fermentation have given rise to a domesticated lineage distinct from the ones already known, like wine, beer, bread, and sake yeasts. Our results show that cachaça yeasts derive from wine yeasts that have undergone an additional round of domestication, which we define as secondary domestication. As a consequence, cachaça strains combine features of wine yeasts, such as the presence of genes relevant for wine fermentation and advantageous gene inactivations, with features of beer yeasts like resistance to the effects of inhibitory compounds present in molasses. For other markers like those related to sulfite resistance and biotin metabolism our analyses revealed distributions more complex than previously reported that support the secondary domestication hypothesis. We propose a multilayered microbe domestication model encompassing not only transitions from wild to primarily domesticated populations, as in the case of wine yeasts, but also secondary domestications like those of cachaça yeasts.

The ecology and diversity of phylloplane yeasts is less well understood in tropical regions than in temperate ones. Therefore, we investigated the yeast diversity associated with the phylloplane of corn, an economically important crop in Thailand, by a culture-dependent method. Thirty-six leaf samples were collected and 217 yeast strains were isolated by plating leaf-washings. The strains were grouped by PCR-fingerprinting and representative strains were identified by analysis of the D1/D2 domain of the large subunit rRNA gene. In total, 212 strains were identified within 10 species in the Ascomycota and 32 species in the Basidiomycota. Five strains represented potential new species in the Basidiomycota, one strain was recently described as Papiliotrema plantarum, and four strains belonged to the genera Vishniacozyma and Rhodotorula. A higher number of strains in the Basidiomycota (81.6%) was obtained. Hannaella sinensis was the species with the highest occurrence. Principal coordinates analysis ordinations of yeast communities revealed that there were no differences in the similarity of the sampling sites. The estimation of the expected species richness showed that the observed species richness was lower than expected. This work indicated that a majority of yeast associated with the phylloplane of corn plant belongs to the phylum Basidiomycota.