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Behavioural ecology

The social side of wild yeast

The workhorse of cell biology, yeast, is a surprisingly cooperative organism. It uses an unusual means of identifying partners — a 'green-beard gene', which encodes a tag that must match among cooperating cells.

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Figure 1: Yeast of a feather floc together.

K. VERSTREPEN

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Queller, D. The social side of wild yeast. Nature 456, 589–590 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/456589a

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