Abstract:The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been used by humans in food and beverage fermentation for nearly 10 000 years. It is also a model organism commonly used in genetics, molecular biology, genomics, and synthetic biology research. Ecological, population genetics, and population genomics studies on both wild and domesticated populations of this species conducted globally in recent years have shown that S. cerevisiae distributes ubiquitously in the wild, including in primitive forests, and may prefer habitats such as broad-leaved tree bark, decaying wood, and surrounding soil. The genetic diversity of S. cerevisiae in China is significantly higher than that in other parts of the world, and the oldest lineages of this species have only been found in China, suggesting an out-of-China origin of this species. Ecological adaptation is the main force shaping the population structure of this species, leading to a clear differentiation between the wild and domesticated populations. The domesticated population has further diverged into solid- and liquid-state fermentation groups, each with different domesticated lineages. The genetic diversity of the wild population is significantly higher than that of the domesticated population, and the formation of genetic diversity in the wild population appears to be mainly caused by neutral mutations. The wild and domesticated populations exhibit significant differences in maltose utilization ability, genomic heterozygosity, sporulation rate, and spore viability, indicating that these two populations adopt different life strategies to adapt to their different habitats. The domesticated lineages adapt to specific ecological niches through lineage-specific copy number variation (CNV), gene content and allele distribution variations, horizontal gene transfer, and introgression.