During the last decade prion-related phenomena were shown to be more widespread than it was initially thought. Prions and prion-like factors were discovered not only in mammals but in other Metazoa and several fungal species. Studies on the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a well-known model organism, were crucial for this understanding. Unicellularity of yeast permits self-templating protein conformations to behave as heritable traits. This is why the first yeast prions had been discovered as non-Mendelian cytoplasmic elements long before the prion hypothesis was proved and acknowledged. After the seminal article published in 1994 by Reed Wickner and suggesting the prion nature of two such elements the prion biology skyrocketed. The rapid progress in the field benefited from this species being easy to cultivate and manipulate, as well as from immense knowledge in yeast genetics and molecular biology accumulated to date. Yeast prions were also implied to be molecular diseases similar to the mammalian a