Preface/Front Matter

Abstract

In 1981 and 1982, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory published the two-volume monograph The Molecular Biology of the Yeast Saccharomyces. These volumes have been very successful, in part because they were produced just at the cusp between two eras. At the beginning of the 1980s, we were not ignorant of yeast biology—decades of work by physiologists, biochemists, microscopists, and classical geneticists (not to mention brewers and bakers before them!) had described many phenomena, outlined many pathways, defined many problems, and even begun to elucidate some molecular mechanisms—and the reviews in the 1981/1982 volumes captured this accumulated information in a way that makes them useful references even today. However, it was also clear that we were then in the early stages of a revolution in which the application of rapidly developing molecular genetic techniques would dramatically increase our understanding of yeast biology, and, in particular, of the molecular mechanisms of the phenomena and pathways that the 1981/1982 reviews so ably described.

In the event, this revolution moved faster and farther than even the most optimistic could have anticipated, and, by the end of the 1980s, it seemed clear that there was a need for a new monograph to supplement (not replace) the earlier one by summarizing the progress that had been made and redefining the problems that lay before us. With this goal, we undertook to produce such a monograph, in three volumes, with the help of a cohort of expert authors. We were not so young and foolish as