Rocio Gomez-Pastor12, Roberto Perez-Torrado2, Elena Garre1 and Emilia Matallana12

1Departamento de Bioquimica y Biologia Molecular, Universitat de Valencia. 2Departamento de Biotecnologia, Instituto de Agroqumica y Tecnologia de Alimentos,

Spain

1. Introduction

Yeasts have been used by humans to produce foods for thousands of years. Bread, wine, sake and beer are made with the essential contribution of yeasts, especially from the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The first references to humans using yeasts were found in Caucasian and Mesopotamian regions and date back to approximately 7000 BC. However, it was not until 1845 when Louis Pasteur discovered that yeasts were microorganisms capable of fermenting sugar to produce CO2 and ethanol. Ancient practices were based on the natural presence of this unicellular eukaryote, which spontaneously starts the fermentation of sugars. As industrialisation increased the manufacture of fermented products, the demand of yeast grew exponentially. At the end of the 19th century, addition of exogenous yeast biomass to produce bread and beer started to become a common practice. Wineries were more reluctant to alter traditional practices, and started using exogenous yeast inocula in the 1950’s, especially in countries with less wine tradition (USA, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). In the 1960’s, yeast biomass-producing plants contributed to the technology of producing large amounts of active dry yeast (ADY), and its use rapidly spread to European countries (Reed and Nagodawithana, 1988).

Nowadays, modern industries require very large amounts of selected yeasts to obtain high quality reproducible products and to ensure fast, complete fermentations. Around 0.4 million metric tonnes of yeast biomass, including 0.2 million tonnes baker’s yeast alone, are produced each year worldwide. Efficient and profitable factory-scale processes have been developed to produce yeast biomass. The standard process was empirically optimised to obtain the highest yield by increasing biomass production and decreasing costs. However in recent years, several molecular and physiological studies have revealed that yeast undergoes diverse stressful situations along the biomass production process which can seriously affect its fermentative capacity and technological performance.

In this chapter, we review the yeast biomass production process, including substrates, growth configuration, yield optimisation and the particularities of brewing, baker — or wine — yeasts production. We summarise the new studies that describe the process from a molecular viewpoint to reveal yeast responses to different stressful situations. Finally, we

highlight the key points to be optimised in order to obtain not only high yields, but also the best biomass fermentative efficiency, and we provide future directions in the field.