%A Indu Khatri
%A Akil Akhtar
%A Kamaldeep Kaur
%A Rajul Tomar
%A Gandham Satyanarayana Prasad
%A Thirumalai Nallan Chakravarthy Ramya
%A Srikrishna Subramanian
%O Open Access
%J Gut Pathogens
%T Gleaning evolutionary insights from the genome sequence of a probiotic yeast Saccharomyces boulardii
%X BACKGROUND:
The yeast Saccharomyces boulardii is used worldwide as a probiotic to alleviate the effects of several gastrointestinal diseases and control antibiotics-associated diarrhea. While many studies report the probiotic effects of S. boulardii, no genome information for this yeast is currently available in the public domain.

RESULTS:
We report the 11.4 Mbp draft genome of this probiotic yeast. The draft genome was obtained by assembling Roche 454 FLX + shotgun data into 194 contigs with an N50 of 251 Kbp. We compare our draft genome with all other Saccharomyces cerevisiae genomes.

CONCLUSIONS:
Our analysis confirms the close similarity of S. boulardii to S. cerevisiae strains and provides a framework to understand the probiotic effects of this yeast, which exhibits unique physiological and metabolic properties.
%N 1
%P 30
%V 5
%D 2013
%I BioMed Central
%R doi:10.1186/1757-4749-5-30
%L open2083