Studies have shown that a whole genome duplication event that happened around 100 million years ago played an important role in the origin of aerobic fermentation in Saccharomyces.Two groups at CAS Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology have now shown that, about 300 million years ago, the other wine and beer yeast, Dekkera bruxellensis, also generated the capacity of aerobic fermentation long before Saccharomyces cerevisiae. By profiling and comparing genome sequences, transcriptomic landscapes and chromatin structures, they showed that no whole genome duplication was necessary in Dekkera to arrive at this metabolic pathway, but rather AT-rich elements in the promoter regions of mitochondrial genes led to a metabolic convergence in two independent yeast species.
CAS news release, October 12, 2017