Fission yeast was isolated in 1893 by Lindner from East African beer. The species name is derived from the Swahili word for beer (Pombe).
The sequence of the S. pombe genome was published in 2002.
The fission yeast researcher Paul Nurse won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with with Lee Hartwell and Tim Hunt, for work on the cell cycle.