IDENTIFICATION OF YEAST STRAINS USING THE POLYMERASE CHAIN-REACTION

Commonly used techniques for the identification of industrial yeast strains are usually time-consuming and cumbersome. Moreover, some of these methods may give ambiguous results. A novel strategy has been developed for identifying yeast strain employing polymerase chain reaction technology. Using customised oligonucleotides, some regions of the yeast genome between delta elements are amplified to give an 'amplified sequence polymorphism' (Skolnick and Wallace 1988) characteristic of the strains, With this technique it is possible to identify individual strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.