Census of Yeasts Isolated from Natural Ecosystem and Conserved in Worldwide Collections

Abstract

There are many well-known public yeast repositories as well as a large number of smaller, less-known collections worldwide; most of these are with the primary goal to preserve the yeast biodiversity in a specific region and the strains from a range of species that are important environmental strains, food spoilage organisms, or strains that play a role in food preparation and human or animal pathogens. In order to have an overview on how many yeast strains are isolated from natural ecosystems and are preserved in collections worldwide, curators of public and private fungal/yeast culture collections were contacted to participate in this survey. Curators of 41 collections from 27 countries supplied data representing a total of 58,095 strains. This includes information on the collection itself, type of environment the strains were isolated from, the countries of origin of the strains, and also the taxonomic information. The ecosystems that are well represented according to the data of preserved strains in the participating collections are plants, insects/invertebrates, aquatic habitats, soil, and extreme cold and extreme warm/dry habitats. The strains have been isolated from a large number of countries worldwide (countries of origin), but it is clear that many parts of the world’s ecosystems are not yet well sampled for yeast diversity. A challenge during this survey was to list the genera and species due to the current and constant changes in taxonomic names. The outcome of this survey is discussed in this chapter.