Genomic Tales of Wine Yeasts: From Domestication to Functional Innovation

Abstract

Over the last decades, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has emerged as a key model for studying microbial domestication, particularly in the context of winemaking. The recent surge of population genomic data, encompassing thousands of genomes, has profoundly reshaped our understanding of the evolutionary history and adaptive potential of wine yeasts. Despite arising from a domestication bottleneck, wine yeasts form a well-structured population and display striking genome dynamism. Extensive variation in heterozygosity, aneuploidy, structural variations and gene content may provide a reservoir of genomic variation that contributes to adaptive potential in the harsh winemaking environment. While some genetic variation and genome restructuring contribute to adaptation, gene flow through hybridization, introgression and especially horizontal gene transfer has emerged as a major driver of functional innovation. These findings establish wine yeasts as a powerful model to link genome evolution with adaptation to anthropogenic environments. They also provide a foundation for the rational improvement of industrial strains through approaches such as quantitative trait locus mapping, adaptive laboratory evolution and genome-wide association studies. Extending these frameworks to non-Saccharomyces species and integrating genomic, functional and ecological data will be key to understanding and engineering microbial communities, to face the modern winemaking challenges.