When Joseph Schacherer started exploring Saccharomyces cerevisiae genomes as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, he had a few dozen yeast isolates. “It was 2005 and high-throughput sequencing was just starting to emerge. Now we have the capacity to explore on a large scale,” says Schacherer, Professor of Genetics and Genomics at University of Strasbourg and the recipient of the 2026 Genetics Society of America Medal. 

He started his own lab at the University of Strasbourg in 2013 and the number of yeast genomes he sequenced soon ballooned to more than 1,000 sequences. This collection of sequences, called the 1,002 Yeast Genomes Project, include strains from all over the world and represent different ecological niches including wine, sake, and baker’s yeasts as well as yeasts in nature. The team published this work in 2018, resulting in over 1,000 citations to date.

“Joseph’s work was foundational to expanding our yeast research program from a single cross between two strains to population-scale approaches,” says Schacherer’s postdoctoral advisor Leonid Kruglyak, Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biological Chemistry and Chair of Human Genetics at UCLA. “He has since become the leader in using population and functional genomics to understand genetic and phenotypic variation in yeast.”

Kruglyak describes Schacherer as someone who “wasn’t afraid to tackle big questions.” And indeed, his collection of over 1,000 yeast genomes was meant to answer a pretty big question: Can we use genotypes to predict phenotypes? “That’s something which is really difficult because most of the time we have complex traits [involving a large number of genes],” Schacherer explains. Additionally, Schacherer and his lab of about 20 researchers is also studying the several layers of regulation that sit between genotypes and phenotypes by looking at the transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome.

Schacherer points out that a common way to study a population is by looking for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). This is the case in human genomics where it has been difficult to get telomere-to-telomere sequences. In a follow up to the 1,002 Yeast Genomes Project, Schacherer’s team used long-read sequencing to obtain near telomere-to-telomere sequences of 1,086 yeast genomes in order to examine the impacts of copy number and structural variants on phenotypes. This was something they couldn’t do with only short-read sequencing. “What’s really interesting is the fact that these structural variants do have an impact on the phenotypic diversity,” says Schacherer. The team showed that including structural variants and small insertion-deletion mutations allowed them to better estimate heritability of traits compared to just using SNPs alone.

This diversity of yeast genomes captured in the 1,002 Yeast Genomes Project adds a much needed resource to the yeast community which had previously focused on the reference strain S288C and its derivatives, explains Charles Boone, a Professor of Molecular Genetics at University of Toronto and a collaborator of Schacherer. However, this approach had limitations—yeast populations are quite diverse, coming from different ecological and geographic niches, and characteristics in these yeasts may not be represented in the reference strain. Boone called this work “a huge contribution to the yeast community.” He adds, “There’s just so many avenues that open with the establishment of a collection of 1,000 wild yeasts that we can study in detail.”

When Schacherer is not in his lab, he’s teaching courses centered on classical genetics and quantitative genetics at the University of Strasbourg. As a member of the Faculty of Life Sciences of the university, he’s developed several new genetics and genomics courses. “I love to communicate about my research during teaching,” Schacherer says. “It’s part of our duty to educate the next generation in terms of research or genetics or science. I think that’s really important.”

Either in the lab or in his courses, Schacherer says that mentoring and teaching are central to his scientific philosophy. Many of his lab members have come from the courses he has taught and to date he has trained 13 graduate students and 10 postdoctoral researchers. Schacherer says that the GSA Medal represents the “success of an entire lab and all the people that have been in the group over the years.”

Please join us in congratulating Joseph Schacherer on receiving the 2026 GSA Medal for his impactful contributions to modern genetics.

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