The different yeast species (not strains) used in alcohol production

ohad said:

Hi all,

I was wondering what are the different yeast species used and what are their different traits.

I know the common ale yeast is S . Cerevisiae , and I think the lager one is S. pastorianus. and then there is Brett, too.

What about S. Bayanus ?
and generally how strict are the uses of these species for their ale - lager classification ?

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and generally how strict are the uses of these species for their ale - lager classification ?

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JohnMc said:

The problem with answering that is work done by lab folks back in the day confuses it. The type strain used for lab work and the granddaddy of most all of them is S288c and it's a cross of Fleischmann's bread yeast by a Carlsberg lager strain and maybe something else tossed in there*, then sporulated (its name means the C pick from Spore 288). This was considered the "type" for Saccharomyces cereviseae, and it's the yeast whose DNA was sequenced in the early 1990's.
So, because the "type" was a blend, the taxonomists lumped a lot of Saccharomyces species into cereviseae.
With the recent advent of "Next Gen" DNA sequence, it's getting a LOT cheaper to sequence an entire genome, so a lot of work is going into sequencing more wild-type isolates (of a lot more than just yeast) and I suspect that we'll see re-division of the genus.

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I'll look into some papers on the issue of taxonomy of yeast species, and see if I can distill a research project out of this problem.

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