About SGD

The Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) provides comprehensive integrated biological information for the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae along with search and analysis tools to explore these data, enabling the discovery of functional relationships between sequence and gene products in fungi and higher organisms.

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New & Noteworthy

  • A Radical Discovery About a Well-Known Enzyme

    05/22/2013

    Living your life puts a lot of wear and tear on you. A big reason is that as your cells go about their business, they churn out lots of damaging chemicals.  One of the worst offenders is the free radical superoxide, O2-. Cells can’t help producing this powerful oxidant during normal metabolism, but it’s so toxic that it can destroy proteins and damage DNA. Cells have come up with a two-step process to deal with this toxic waste. In...read more >
  • Codependent Genes

    05/16/2013

    When a gene is duplicated, one copy usually dies. It is battered by harmful mutations until it eventually just fades into background DNA. But this isn't the fate of all duplicated genes.  Sometimes they can survive by gaining new, useful functions.  The genes responsible for snake venom proteins are a great example of this. Another way for a duplicated gene to live on is when both copies get different mutations that confer different functions, so that a...read more >
  • Keeping the Noise Down

    05/08/2013

    When you get down to a single cell, things can get really noisy. Instead of the nice, smoothed over data that you see in populations, you see some variation from cell to cell. This is even if all the cells are identical genetically. Of course this makes perfect sense if you think about it. Part of the variation comes from slightly different environments. Conditions at the bottom of the flask are bound to be different from...read more >
  • Breaking Up is Hard to Do

    05/01/2013

    When a cell goes cancerous, its chromosomes get seriously messed up. Pieces get deleted, duplicated, mixed and matched. One of the worst things that can happen, in terms of a cell keeping its chromosomes together, is that a chromosome ends up with two centromeres. A centromere is the part of a chromosome that gets attached to the spindle so it can be moved to the right place during cell division. When there are two centromeres, both...read more >