Screaming Yeast: Sonocytology, Cytoplasmic Milieus, and Cellular Subjectivities

Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as yeast, is a unicellular fungus with a cell cycle similar to that of humans. The first eukaryote to have its genome fully sequenced and a standard model organism in biology research,2 yeast is an organism that lends itself to multisensory experiences. It has been imaged extensively with light and atomic force microscopy, and anyone who has seen the bottom of a pint glass or walked past a bakery can speak to Saccharomyces cerevisiae’s olfactory and gustatory allure. It is fitting, then, that this species is also the first to have its cellular noises amplified and recorded. Sonocytology, a recently developed technique within nanotechnology research, uses a scanning probe microscope to record the vibrational movements of cell walls and amplifies these vibrations so that humans can hear them. Yeast cells vibrate approximately one thousand times per sec-