Kluyveromyces lactis and the 14th workshop 'Biology of Kluyveromyces'.

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This annual workshop is one of the few yeast meetings dedicated to a non-conventional species. Its 14th meeting was held on July 6–8, 2001, at the Orsay campus of the University of Paris XI. Originally, the workshop was created in 1988 as an instrument for the network of European laboratories involved in the European Biotechnology programmes. With its modest size (generally oscillating around 50–80 participants), the meeting is conveniently held at different European cities. Although it receives a small ad hoc contribution from a few companies, the cost is mostly covered by the participants. On some occasions the workshop took the form of a satellite meeting parasiting large yeast conferences like ICYGMB, because this allows the scientists of other continents to participate without additional costs. In the 1960s, H.O. Halvorson (Wisconsin) began to use Kluyveromyces lactis to study β-glucosidase regulation. Since then, this organism always had its advocates, but remained in the shadow of the prestigious Saccharomyces cerevisiae . It is only after 1980 that K. lactis research became more visible, probably due to the interest of three unrelated topics: (i) the killer system based on linear DNA plasmids, (ii) the lactose metabolism and (iii) the secretion of recombinant proteins. At present an increasing number of people working on S. cerevisiae try to extend their thematic enquiries to other yeasts, but the choice is limited. K. lactis is practically the only alternative that can offer all the possibilities of a genetic approach, the other ‘genetic yeasts’, Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Yarrowia lipolytica , being too distant from S. cerevisiae . Rather than providing a report dealing only with the last meeting (which was much troubled by an airline strike), I may give below a quick summary, admittedly partial and biased, of the topics which have often been discussed in the Kluyveromyces …