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LAB NEWS Archives

April 2020

Congratulations to David Peris and the entire research team on their Nature Communications publication of the synthetic 6-species hybrid! Check it out!

Researchers create hybrids of six yeast species to combine useful traits. by Jill Sakai

Congratulations to Quinn Langdon, et al., on their publication of 200 Saccharomyces eubayanus genomes in PLOS Genetics. Check it out!

March 2020

Postdoctoral Position Open - Please click here for more information and apply by 31 March 2020.

January 2020

Congratulations to Dr. Drew Doering on his successful defense of his doctoral thesis!

Winter 2020

Chris Todd Hittinger is honored to be elected to represent the USA on the International Commission on Yeasts (ICY)! Here are the now-public minutes.

October 2019

Congratulations to Dr. Quinn Langdon and colleagues on their recent publication "Fermentation innovation through complex hybridization of wild and domesticated yeasts." Check it out!

Check out this great article reviewing this new publication. "Deepest look yet at brewer's yeasts reveals the diversity harnessed by humans" by Eric Hamilton.

September 2019

We are recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher in evolutionary and synthetic biology. Please click here for more information and apply by 31st October 2019.

August 2019

UPDATE!!!!  Congratulations to Dr. Quinn Langdon for winning the prestigious Schlimgen Award which is awarded to the top graduating student of the Genetics program at UW-Madison!

Congratulations to Dr. Quinn Langdon on her successful defense of her doctoral thesis!

July 2019

Chris Hittinger is named as a H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellow. Congratulations!

The Hittinger Lab has a visiting student this summer. Welcome to Manuel Alvarez from Arizona!

June 2019

Jacob Steenwyk and the y1000+ project team analyze the genomes of an unsually rapidly evolving ancient group of yeasts in their PLOS Biology article Extensive loss of cell-cycle and DNA repair genes in an ancient lineage of bipolar budding yeasts. Check it out!

May 2019

Opulente et. al. publishes dozens of wild strains of yeast opportunistic pathogens in their latest FEMS Yeast Research article titled Pathogenic budding yeasts isolated outside of clinical settings. Check it out!

The Hittinger Lab has relocated to the Wisconsin Energy Institute.

April 2019

Dr. Emily Baker publishes a paper titled "Evolution of a novel chimeric maltotriose transporter in Saccharomyces eubayanus from parent proteins unable to perform this function" in PLOS Genetics. Beautiful cover art, and Congratulations, Dr. Baker!

Check it out!

John Crandall has won one of the prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships from NSF. Check it out!

February 2019

Postdoctoral Training Position Available.

Congratulations to Dr. Kominek and Drew Doering on their Cell publication, Eukaryotic acquisition of a bacterial operon. Check it out!

Yeasts reach across tree of life to domesticate suite of bacterial genes

January 2019

Dr. EmilyClare Baker and colleagues publish Mitochondrial DNA and temperature tolerance in lager yeasts in Science Advances. Check it out!

Genes behind lager yeast’s cold- and sugar-loving success revealed

December 2018

Welcome to our newest lab member, John Crandall, a PhD Candidate from the Laboratory of Genetics!

November 2018

The Y1000+ Team published a paper titled "Tempo and Mode of Genome Evolution in the Budding Yeasts Subphylum" in Cell. This paper reports the genome sequences and analyses of 332 species of budding yeast. Check it out!

Check out this article about this great new piece of research! Broad genome analysis shows yeast evolving by subtraction

October 2018

Dr. Dave Krause and his colleagues publish a paper titled "Functional and evolutionary characterization of a secondary metabolite gene cluster in budding yeasts." in PNAS. Check it out!

Press regarding this article:

September 2018

Quinn Langdon and colleagues publish their most recent work titled "sppIDer: a species identification tool to investigate hybrid genomes with high-=throughput sequencing" in Molecular Biology and Evolution. Check it out!

July 2018

Dr. Christina Meihua Kuang and colleagues publish their most recent work titled "Repeated cis-regulatory tuning of a metabolic bottleneck gene during evolution" in Molecular Biology and Evolution. Check it out!

May 2018

Our very own Professor Chris Hittinger is awarded one of the Vilas Faculty Early Career Investigator Awards!

Wild YEAST program is making a culinary impact! Check it out here in the article "Wild Wisconsin yeast find their way into bread, beer, and class" by Eric Hamilton

April 2018

Quinn Langdon wins the Undergraduate Mentor Award! Congratulations, Quinn!

Congratulations to Rachel Schneider and Hayely Stoneman for winning research awards to continue their research through the summer.

March 2018

Dr. Dana Opulente, and colleagues, publish "Factors driving metabolic diversity in the budding yeast subphylum." in BMC Biology. Check it out!

January 2018

Hayley Stoneman joins the lab as an undergraduate researcher. Welcome, Hayley!

November 2017

Hittinger and UW Food Science colleagues publish a review on "Diverse yeasts for diverse fermented beverages and foods” in Current Opinion in Biotechnology

October 2017

Dr. Chris Hittinger is named one of the "40 Under 40" by Midwest Energy News! Congratulations, Chris!

Check out "Salvation through Fermentation" by Krista Eastman, in the Fall issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas which highlights Dr. Russell Wrobel and the work on yeast hybrids. Congratulations!

September 2017

The lab welcomes three new researchers to the lab for another great year of research. Caroline, Napoleon, and James are the latest recruits to a great bunch of undergraduate researchers. Check out the whole crew!

August 2017

Congratulations to Dr. Christina Kuang, our newly minted PhD!

To see her defense, visit this webpage hosted by UW's Biotech Center. Thanks to them for their generosity in filming and hosting these talks.

June 2017

Dr. David Peris Navarro, a postdoc in the lab, receives a prize from the Science Foundation of Ireland, for the 33rd International Specialized Symposium on Yeast (ISSY33), and gave an oral presentation at the conference, 26-29 of June, 2017, in Cork, Ireland. Congratluations, Dr. Peris!

May & June 2017

Check out the BiofuelsDigest coverage of Max's discovery!

Check out this interview with Green Bay's Fox 11 and Max Haase regarding his new discovery!

Undergraduate student Max Haase of Green Bay names a new species of yeast for packers! Here is the UWMadScience Blog piece and scientific article.

Spring 2017

Congratulations to Max Haase for winning a University Book Store Academic Excellence Award for his research!

Congratulations to graduating seniors Kelly Buh (Genetics), Max Haase (Evolutionary Biology), and Ryan Moriarty (Genetics)!

April 2017

Media specialist Lisa Sorlie takes research experience and innovative curriculum back to Bonduel School District

GLBRC Reporting on her successes

STEM Diversity program reporting

Microbiology PhD student EmilyClare Baker is awarded a Louis and Elsa Thomsen Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship for her research on the S. eubayanus genome!

March 2017

GLBRC postdoctoral associate David Peris and colleagues show the potential of interspecies hybridization for biofuel production by Saccharomyces. Read about it in Biotechnology for Biofuels! Check it out!

Spring 2017

The Hittinger Lab welcomes Rachel to the lab!

Fall 2016

The Hittinger Lab has grown in numbers this fall! We welcome Samantha, Ellie, Ritika, and Aaron as our newest Wild YEAST Hunters! We also welcome Edward, our newest hands that keep us clean, stocked, and organized.

October 2016

PhD student Christina (Meihua) Kuang, et al., show how "ongoing resolution of duplicate gene functions shapes the diversification of a metabolic network."

Full article in eLife

September 2016

Dr. David Krause joins the lab. Welcome, Dr. Krause!

Summer 2016

Check out this article about our amazing summer RET, Lisa Sorlie! Have a great school year, Mrs. Sorlie.

What I did on my summer vacation!

July 2016

David Peris, Quinn Langdon, and colleagues show how rare North American wild isolates of Saccharomyces eubayanus are related to each other and domesticated hybrid lager yeasts.

UW press release

Spanish language press release

Full article in PLoS Genetics

June 2016

Congratulations to Dr. Bill Alexander on his new job! He has accepted an exciting opportunity at Muse Biotechnology, an up-and-coming genome engineering and synthetic biology company based in Boulder, Colorado. There he will set up the yeast side of their rapidly growing operation.

April 2016

Awards Season for lab members!

Emily Baker, author of The genome sequence of Saccharomyces eubayanus and the domestication of lager-brewing yeasts has won MBE's best student paper award for 2015! Congratulations, Emily!

We also want to congratulate Max Haase, Martin Jarzyna and Ryan Moriarty, all undergraduate researchers in our lab, who have won research awards. Great Job All!

  • Max won a prestigious Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship.
  • Martin won a Lakeshore Nature Preserve Student Engagement Grant.
  • Ryan and Max both won awards from the Laboratory of Genetics to support their research.

Two lab members also won awards to attend The Allied Genetics Conference in Florida this summer. Congratulations to Dr. David Peris Navarro and Max Haase.

March 2016

Dr. Russell Wrobel joins the lab!

Dr. William Alexander published a paper in PNAS titled:

Horizontally acquired genes in early-diverging pathogenic fungi enable the use of host nucleosides and nucleotides.

Check it out!

February 2016

Members of the Hittinger Lab share their knowledge of colony morphology and genetic heretability in yeast at the 2016 Tree of Life event. Large numbers of eager students joined us for the afternoon to learn with labs. Thank you to all who worked hard to make this event a huge success!

December 2015

Hittinger and colleagues publish a review on “Genomics and the making of yeast biodiversity” in Current Opinion in Genetics and Development.

Read it here!

November 2015

William G. Alexander and colleagues publish a new method for making synthetic yeast hybrids for brewing and biofuels research.

Download the paper here!

Check out the UW Press Release here!

For more great press on this paper, check out the press followings on our Press page!

September 2016

Dr. Jacek Kominek joins the lab. Welcome to the USA!

August 2015

EmilyClare Baker and colleagues publish Saccharoymces eubayanus genome in new paper.

"Lager yeasts did not just originate once. This unlikely marriage between two species, genetically as different from one another as humans and birds, happened at least twice. Although these hybrids were different from the start, they also changed in some predictable ways during their domestication," said Chris Todd Hittinger.

Here is the official press release from MBE

UW-News Press Release by David Tenenbaum

Download the paper here!

June 2015

Dr. Dana Opulente joins the lab. Welcome Dr. Opulente!

Chris Hittinger has been selected as one of the two recipients of the Alfred Toepfer Faculty Fellow Awards.

The one-year award is bestowed on pre-tenure faculty whose research benefits agricultural activities within the United States and whose areas of interest lie in the scientific fields of crop research, improvements in crop yield and quality, or animal sciences. The award can also go to faculty members whose agricultural research is considered biological or physical in nature. This award is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

April 20, 2015

Chris Hittinger is mentioned in Rebecca Blank's Op Ed piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Economic success depends on UW, other public universities". Check it out!

April 7, 2015

Bucky Badger came to the Hittinger Lab to meet Blastobotrys buckinghamii, one of the eight newly discovered yeasts published by Kayla Sylvester.

Read all about it!

eCALS - April 9, 2015

University of Wisconsin-Madison NEWS - March 13, 2015, by David Tenenbaum

UW Extension - Bucky yeast joins list of new yeast discoveries - March 13, 2015 (audio file)

March 2015

Kayla Sylvester and a team of Wild YEAST researchers publishes a paper on a survey of our wild yeast samples, and describes eight new yeast species! Download here!

Temperature and host preferences drive the diversification of Saccharomyces and other yeasts: a survey and the discovery of eight new yeast species.

And check out the great press this publication is getting!

Spring 2015

Check out "Forever Rising", by Terry Devitt, the feature article (and cover) of the Spring 2015 Grow Magazine, Wisconsin's magazine for the life sciences. Download the pdf here!

November 1, 2014

Dr. William Alexander and Drew Doering publish a paper on genome editing...

High-efficiency genome editing and allele replacement in prototrophic and wild strains of Saccharomyces.

Download the paper here.

September 12, 2014

Drew Doering wins the UW Genetics Retreat Poster Award for early-years PhD Candidates! Congratulations, Drew!

Christina Kuang and Drew Doering win CMB Travel Awards! Congratulations Christina and Drew!

September 10, 2014

Chris Todd Hittinger, Cletus P. Kurtzman, and Antonis Rokas have been awarded a Dimensions of Biodiversity grant from the National Science Foundation! "The Making of Biodiversity Across the Yeast Subphylum" or Y1000+ Project will sequence the complete genomes of all ~1000 described species of Saccharomycotina yeasts and explore how genetic and ecological diversity have evolved across hundreds of millions of years. Apply now to join the project as a postdoctoral researcher or student!

September 9, 2014

William G. Alexander, Drew T. Doering, and Chris Todd Hittinger publish a new method for efficient genome editing and allele replacement in wild and industrial yeasts! The accepted version of the paper appears online in Genetics . The Haploid Engineering and Replacement Protocol (HERP) cassettes are available (email), along with detailed protocols describing their use.

June 24, 2014

Chris Hittinger is named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. Please see the press releases by the Pew Charitable Trusts and University of Wisconsin for more information.

June 2014

The Hittinger Lab welcomes Michael Price, REU, and Sarah Wright, RET, to the lab for summer experiments and learning!

We also wish Qi-Ming Wang, visitor from the Bai Lab in China, the best for the rest of his career!

May 2014

Drew Doering, PhD candidate, has won a Genomic Sciences Training Program traineeship based on his project "Mapping functional consequences of sequence divergence in yeast and beyond via pooled allele swapping". To see more about GSTP, please continue here.

April 9, 2014

David Peris and collaborators' research into Saccharomyces eubayanus diversity appears on the cover of Molecular Ecology! This new work shows that S. eubayanus, one of the parents of hybrid lager-brewing yeast, is native but not endemic to Patagonia. Diego Libkind isolated highly diverse strains in Patagonia, but Kayla Sylvester isolated rare strains in Wisconsin. These are the first pure S. eubayanus strains isolated from outside of South America, and their low diversity and mosaic genetic makeup suggest that they are recent migrants. In contrast with Patagonian S. eubayanus, we show that hybrid European brewing strains have very low diversity. Read the UW press release here.

Download the paper here.

Supplemental data is found here.

Or request a copy.

The S. eubayanus strains from Wisconsin are available for licensing. Click here for information.

December 2013

Drew Doering joins the lab!

November 2013

Mariana Lopes, a PhD candidate from Brazil, joins the lab! We are excited to have her with us for 1 year.

September 2013

Wild YEAST program debuts at Wisconsin Science Festival September 29. Check us out!

Ryan Moriarty joins the Hittinger Lab as a Freshman Undergraduate Research Student in the WildYEAST program. Happy Yeast Hunting!!!

August 2013

Quinn Langdon begins her NSF Graduate Research Fellowship on the "Ecological genomics of temperature preference in wild S. eubayanus yeast." Congratulations to Quinn on winning this prestigious fellowship!

Summer 2013

"Chris Todd Hittinger, an assistant professor of genetics and a researcher with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), has won a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award to study how Saccharomyces yeasts...(read more)"

Qi-Ming Wang, a Senior Scientist from China, joins the lab! We are excited to have him learning with us for one year.

Our review on Saccharomyces diversity appears on the cover of "Trends in Genetics", May 2013

The WildYEAST program celebrates its second summer of research with two undergraduate researchers.

Winter 2012

Emily Baker and Heidi tessmer join the lab!

Fall 2012

New Lab Members:

Jin Kang
Russell Mendez
D. Peris Navarro, PhD

Summer 2012

The Hittinger Lab hosts the first summer participants in the Wild YEAST Program. Participants take part in hands-on wild yeast isolation to identification, and beyond! Click on the logo above to learn more.

February 2012

8th - Chris Hittinger presents The Origin and Evolution of Lager-brewing Yeast: Hunting Wild Yeast in Patagonia and Around the World. Click here to watch.

January 2012

Kayla Sylvester joins the lab

December 2011

Meihua (Christina) Kuang joins the lab

September 2011

Brielle James joins the lab

22 August 2011

Our tri-continental collaboration reports the discovery of the missing contributor to hybrid lager yeast strains in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. This newly discovered species hybridized with a Saccharomyces cerevisiae ale yeast to form the lager yeast Saccharomyces pastorianus. Named Saccharomyces eubayanus for its relationship to the complex hybrid Saccharomyces bayanus, it thrives in the cool environment of Patagonia on southern beech trees and their sugar-rich galls (see pictures on this page and more here). Click here for a general summary from the UW press office. Click here for the genome sequence data. Click here to download the paper. (Photos by Diego Libkind)

1 August 2011

Dr. William G. Alexander joins the lab as our first postdoc!

1 July 2011

Hittinger Lab opens!

April-June 2011

Our 6-lab Saccharomyces sensu stricto (SSS) consortium releases vastly improved complete genome sequences and a collection of genetically engineered lab strains for 3 species of yeast. The work is described in the inaugural issue of the new Genetics Society of America (GSA) open-access journal G3: Genes | Genomes | Genetics. Click here to download the paper. Click here to view all the supplements and browsers. Click here to request strains.