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 δ elements are amplified to give an ‘amplified’ sequence polymorphisml (Skolnick and Wallace 1988) characteristic of the strains. With this technique it is possible to identify individual strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.