Saccharomyces Phylogeny

With the goal of identifying functional non-coding DNA sequences in the yeast genome, we have partially determined the genome sequences (2 to 4-fold shotgun coverage) of five Saccharomyces species:

• S. mikatae
• S. kudriavzevii
• S. bayanus
• S. castellii
• S. kluyveri

The first three species listed above are relatively closely related to S. cerevisiae, and the alignments of their sequences to S. cerevisiae sequence are likely to be most useful for identifying conserved non-coding sequences. The last two species listed above are more distantly related to S. cerevisiae, so alignments of S. cerevisiae protein sequences to their orthologs in these species are likely to be more useful for identifying possible functional domains in protein sequence (see Cliften et al. . for a more in depth discussion of the utility of these sequence alignments for identifying functional sequences).