Functional genomics in wine yeast: DNA Arrays and next generation sequencing

Abstract

Since their very beginning, DNA array and next-generation sequencing technologies have been used with Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells. In the last 7 years, an increasing number of studies have focused on the study of wine strains and winemaking. The uncovering of the genomic features of these strains and expression profiles under the different stressful conditions that they have to deal with have contributed significantly to the knowledge of how this amazing microorganism can convert grape must into a drink that has enormously influenced mankind for 7000 years.This review presents a synopsis of DNA array and next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies and focus mainly in their use in studying wine yeast gene expression profiles, recapitulating the major findings about S. cerevisiae biology that have emerged from its application and how they contributed to the improvement of industrial winemaking process. Although the use of microarrays to generate gene expression data has become widespread, thanks to the advent of NGS, RNA-seq has recently become an attractive alternative method in the studies of transcriptomes, promising several advantages compared with microarrays.