Yeast-mediated dough fermentation is an important phase in the bread making process. The fermentative performance of yeast cells during fermentation is of critical importance for final bread quality, since yeast cells produce CO 2 and other metabolites that have an influence on dough rheology and bread texture, volume, and taste. Different factors affect the fermentative performance of yeast cells during dough fermentation, including dough ingredients, fermentation conditions, the type of yeast strain used and yeast pregrowth conditions. Bread dough is a complex matrix that contains several ingredients that can affect the fermentation rate of yeast cells. Although the individual effects of sugar availability and salt level on the leavening ability of yeast have been studied extensively, a comprehensive overview of the relationship between bread dough constituents, fermentation conditions and yeast functionality is still lacking. Moreover, the dough environment is highly variable as several types of dough like lean, sweet or frozen doughs are currently produced by commercial bread producers. For optimal fermentation rates in different types of dough, the use of appropriate yeast strains with specific phenotypic traits is required. Therefore, many researchers have focused on the improvement of yeast strains for optimal fermentation in different types of dough like lean, sweet or frozen dough. Against this background, this review summarizes the current knowledge on the interaction between bread dough and baker's yeast and how to improve this interaction, thereby providing a useful background for further research concerning the functionality of yeast in bread dough.

Plants often produce antifungal peptides and proteins in response to infection. Also wheat, which is the main ingredient of bread dough, contains such components. Here, we show that while some industrial strains of the baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae can efficiently ferment dough, some other strains show much lower fermentation capacities because they are sensitive to a specific wheat protein. We purified and identified what turned out to be a thaumatin-like protein through a combination of activity-guided fractionation, cation exchange chromatography, reversed-phase HPLC, and LC−MS/MS. Recombinant expression of the corresponding gene and testing the activity confirmed the inhibitory activity of the protein.