My model organism of choice for research is the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. My scientific role model is my advisor Dr. Andreas Hochwagen. We were asked to make a GIF or short video melding these two topics for a recent department retreat. I went a bit weird with this animation, drawing inspiration from eccentric youtube birthday videos. There is also a bunch of cryptic science mixed into this chaotic video describing the life cycle of a budding yeast. It starts off with the vegetative growth phase of mitotically dividing cells that inevitably depletes shared resources and leads to “stress”-induced mating type switching (gender transformation), diploid formation (yeast sex), and eventually to the formation of spores (the future generation) after meiotic division.