A recent Enerzine article finds that certain strains of yeast, an organism well known for its ability to transform carbohydrates into products such as bread and beer, may prefer light to darkness. This discovery could therefore have major implications for our understanding of evolution and biofuel production.
Published in the journal Current Biology, the study by researchers from Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences succeeded in creating one of the first yeast strains that appears to grow faster in the light.
Being able to easily endow yeast with such an evolutionarily important trait could have major implications for our understanding of the origin of this trait and how it can be used to study things like biofuel production, evolution and cellular ageing.