<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p><italic>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</italic> strains frequently exhibit rather specific phenotypic features
needed for adaptation to a special environment. Wine yeast strains are able to ferment
musts, for example, while other industrial or laboratory strains fail to do so. The genetic
differences that characterize wine yeast strains are poorly understood, however. As a first
search of genetic differences between wine and laboratory strains, we performed DNA-array
analyses on the typical wine yeast strain T73 and the standard laboratory
background in S288c. Our analysis shows that even under normal conditions, logarithmic
growth in YPD medium, the two strains have expression patterns that differ significantly in
more than 40 genes. Subsequent studies indicated that these differences correlate with
small changes in promoter regions or variations in gene copy number. Blotting copy
numbers vs. transcript levels produced patterns, which were specific for the individual
strains and could be used for a characterization of unknown samples.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2001 Apr; 2(2):69-79