Skip to Content by Bill Snyder | Posted on Thursday, Feb. 7,
2013 — 10:02 AM Budding yeast occupies a place of honor in the
pantheon of human history. Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been
used for baking and alcoholic fermentation for thousands of
years. Easily manipulated and cultured in the laboratory, this
one-celled eukaryote (each cell has a nucleus) also has revealed
much about fundamental cellular processes, including DNA
replication, cell division and metabolism. Today the lowly yeast
is helping scientists develop methods for predicting how genes
are turned on and off, or regulated, by signals from proteins
and the environment. This information should aid efforts to
better understand, and ultimately thwart, human diseases such as
cancer. In the Feb. 1 issue of Science magazine, Vanderbilt
University’s Gregor Neuert, Ph.D., M.Eng., and colleagues report
how they developed predictive models for complex gene expression
and signaling pathways in S. cerevisiae by integrating single-
cell experiments with stoch