Characteristics of Morphological and Physiological Changes during the Autolysis Process of Saccharomyces cerevisiae FX-2

In this paper, the autolysis process of Saccharomyces cerevisiae FX-2 (S. cerevisiae FX-2) via, a variety of endogenous enzyme, was investigated systematically by analyzing changes in physicochemical parameters in autolysate, surface morphology and the internal structure of the yeast cells. As an explicit conclusion, the arisen autolysis depended on the pH and the optimal pH was found to be 5.5. Based on the experimental data and the characteristics of mycelia morphology, a hypothesis is put forward that simple proteins in yeast vacuolar are firstly degraded for utilization, and then more membrane- bound proteins are hydrolyzed to release hydrolytic enzymes, which arouse an enzymatic reaction to induce the collapse of the cell wall into the cytoplasm.