Yeast

A yeast is a single-celled fungi. It is related to other fungi that people are more familiar with. These include edible mushrooms which are available at the local supermarket, common baker’s yeast used to leaven bread, molds that ripen blue cheese as well as molds that produce antibiotics for medical and veterinary use. Many consider edible yeast and fungi to be as natural as fruits and vegetables.

Yeast Cells

Over 600 different species of yeast are known and God has widely distributed them in nature. They are found in association with other microorganisms as part of the normal inhabitants of soil, vegetation, marine and other aqueous environments. Some yeast species are also natural inhabitants of man and animals. While some species are highly specialized and found only in certain habitats at certain times of the year, other species are generalists and can be isolated from many different sources.

Baker’s yeast is used to leaven bread throughout the world and it is the type of yeast that people are most familiar with. Baker’s yeast is produced from the genus and species of yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

A typical yeast cell is approximately equal in size to a human red blood cell and is spherical to ellipsoidal in shape. Because it is so very tiny, it takes about 30 billion yeast cells to make up to one gram of compressed baker’s yeast. Yeasts reproduce magnanimously by budding, a process during which a new bud grows from the side of the existing cell wall. This bud eventually breaks away from the mother cell to form a separate daughter cell. Each budding yeast cell, on average, undergoes this budding process 12 to 15 times before it is no longer capable of budding. During commercial production, yeast is grown under carefully controlled conditions on a sugar containing media typically composed of beet and cane molasses. Under ideal growth conditions a yeast cell reproduces every two to three hours.