---
title: A Single Yeast Strain Now Responds to Two Colours of Light
description: NUS researchers engineered baker's yeast with independent red and blue light channels, one to make a compound, the other to clump cells for collection.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-08-11T16:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-08-11T16:20:18.601Z
canonical: https://richhealthmagazine.com/article/dual-channel-optogenetics-yeast-nus
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/nus-colour-sensing-yeast-139381.webp
categories: Food & Nutrition
content_type: News
region: Global
publication: Rich Health Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

A team at the National University of Singapore has engineered a strain of baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, that takes two independent instructions from light: blue light switches on the chemistry that makes a product, and red light makes the cells clump together so the product is easier to extract. The work, led by Associate Professor Poh Chueh-Loo of NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation and the Department of Biomedical Engineering, was [published in Nature Communications](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-73399-0) in May, with the PhD student Linus Tan Yu Han as lead author.

Engineered yeast already turns sugar into medicines, fuels and industrial chemicals, but the instructions usually arrive as a chemical inducer that has to be added by hand and cannot be taken back once it is in the vessel. Optogenetics, switching genes on and off with light, changes that: the instruction can be adjusted during a run. Getting two colours to work independently in the same strain had not been done in S. cerevisiae, because the systems developed for different wavelengths need several genes and tend to activate one another.

## A Red Light Switch That Needed No Added Chemicals

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