Not available – first paragraph follows: Yeast is one of the major industrial microorganisms, used in the brewing, baking, and wine industries. Most improvements in wine making have resulted from better grape varieties (such as Ruby Cabernet developed at University of California, Davis) or from improvements in fermentation practices. Not much attention has been given to planned improvement of the other organism on which the wine industry is based, the wine yeast. Yeast has many favorable characteristics making it one of the best organisms to use for basic genetics research, and as a result, our genetic understanding of it has reached an extremely high level.