[Molecular identification methods of yeasts of biotechnological interest]

Yeasts have numerous applications in modern and traditional biotechnology. They take place in production of food, unicellular protein and products with added value, and in the last decades they have been incorporated to the biotechnology industry as host in the production of eukaryotes proteins. Apart from their advantages, some genera are the causes of mycosis on man and in some cases, are opportunistic pathogens associated to diseases such as HIV. They are also agents responsible for the damaging of fresh and elaborated food for human consumption. For these reasons, the quick and accurate identification of industrially, environmentally and clinically significant yeasts is important. Yeast taxonomy has been supported by conventional techniques, based on morphological and physiological descriptions of species and genera, but depend on strain culture conditions, therefore they have introduced errors in yeast taxonomy and originated the duality of their nomenclature. These difficulties have been solved with the application of molecular techniques, based on the sequence analysis of nucleic acid, specially karyotiping electrophoresis, microsatellite analysis, mitochondrial DNA length polymorphism, restriction fragment length polymorphism of ribosomal RNA, ramdom amplified polymorphic DNA and low molecular weight RNA. In this review all those methods are described, which have allowed the development of identification kits for clinical and industrial application for the clearance of phylogenetic relationships among species and genera of yeasts of biotechnological interest.