GSE191212
Engineering class-B vitamin biosynthesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Saccharomyces cerevisiae is bradytroph for class B vitamins, it means that yeast cells exhibit slower growth in the absence of an external source of these metabolites. Alleviating these nutritional requirements for optimal growth performance would represent a valuable phenotypic characteristic for industrial strains since this would result in cheaper processes that would also be less susceptible to contaminations. In the present study, suboptimal growth of S. cerevisiae in absence of either pantothenic acid, para-aminobenzoic acid (pABA), pyridoxine, inositol and biotin were corrected by single or double gene overexpression of native FMS1, ABZ1/ABZ2, SNZ1/SNO1, INO1 and the Cyberlindnera fabianii BIO1, respectively. Several strategies were attempted to improve growth of S. cerevisiae CEN.PK113-7D in absence of thiamine, revealing that overexpression of THI4 and THI4/THI5 was able to improve growth up to 83% of the maximum specific growth rate of the reference CEN.PK113-7D in medium including all vitamins. Although the initial aim of this study was to combine all identified mutations in a single strain, the engineered strain IMX2210 only harboured genes to correct biotin, pABA, pantothenate and inositol bradotrophies. Firstly, this strain was fast-growing at a maximum specific growth rate of 0.28 ± 0.01 h-1 in medium devoid of all vitamins. Secondly, this strain exhibited physiological variables in aerobic glucose limited chemostat cultures at a dilution rate of 0.1 h-1 in absence of vitamins similar to that of the reference strain CEN.PK113-7D grown in the same conditions but in a fully supplemented complete medium. These physiological similarities were further emphasized by the limited differences observed in comparative transcriptome analysis from the chemostat culture grown cells that were essentially affecting genes of the class B vitamins biosynthetic pathways. This work paves the way towards construction of the first fast growing vitamin-independent S. cerevisiae strain. Overall design: The goals of this study were to investigate whether strategies can be found to eliminate single vitamin requirements and if the found solutions could be combined yielding a vitamin-independent S. cerevisiae strain. Next, the engineered strain was characterized for growth performance in batch and chemostat cultures and compared to a parental strain requiring vitamin supplementation for optimal growth. Finally, transcriptome data of the engineered strain grown in absence of vitamins was analyzed and compared to its isogenic reference grown in presence of vitamins.