Origin, evolution and domestication of the budding yeast S. cerevisiae

An understanding of natural variation is crucial to efforts in current biology and to decipher the dynamics of genome evolution. The budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has emerged as a leading system for population genomics studies due to it's small, well-characterized genome and experimental tractability. In the past decade, we assembled a large collection of natural isolates of S. cerevisiae and its closest relative S. paradoxus strains and characterized them at the genomic and phenotypic levels. We applied different sequencing and computational approaches to investigate origin, evolution, secondary contacts, and domestication of the species. These data provide a comprehensive view of genomic diversity in budding yeast and expose pronounced population-level differences.