The lager brewing yeast S. pastorianus is a hybrid between S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus with extensive chromosome aneuploidy. S. pastorianus is subdivided into Group 1 and Group 2 strains: Group 2 strains have higher copy number and a larger degree of heterozygosity for S. cerevisiae chromosomes. As a result, Group 2 strains were hypothesized to have emerged from a hybridization event distinct from Group 1 strains. Current genome assemblies of S. pastorianus strains are incomplete and highly fragmented, limiting our ability to investigate their evolutionary history.
To fill this gap, we generated a chromosome-level genome assembly of the S. pastorianus strain CBS 1483 using MinION sequencing and analysed the newly assembled subtelomeric regions and chromosome heterozygosity. To analyse the evolutionary history of S. pastorianus strains, we developed Alpaca: a method to compute sequence similarity between genomes without assuming linear evolution. Alpaca revealed high similarities between the S. cerevisiae subgenomes of Group 1 and 2 strains, and marked differences from sequenced S. cerevisiae strains.
Our findings suggest that Group 1 and Group 2 strains originated from a single hybridization involving a heterozygous S. cerevisiae strain, followed by loss of S. cerevisiae genome content in Group 1 strains. The clear differences between both groups may originate from dissemination from few initial isolates. Furthermore, Alpaca provides a computationally inexpensive method to analyse evolutionary relationships while considering non-linear evolution such as horizontal gene transfer and sexual reproduction, providing a complementary viewpoint beyond traditional phylogenetic approaches. Less...