Discovery of Several Novel Targets that Enhance ?-Carotene Production in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

ABSTRACT: ?-Carotene is the precursor of vitamin A, and also exhibits multiple pharmaceutical functions by itself. In comparison to chemical synthesis, the production of ?-carotene in microbes by metabolic engineering strategy is relatively inexpensive. Identifying genes enhancing ?-carotene production in microbes is important for engineering a strain of producing higher yields of ?-carotene. Most of previous efforts in identifying the gene targets have focused on the isoprenoid pathway where the ?-carotene biosynthesis belongs. However, due to the complex interactions between metabolic fluxes, seemingly irrelevant genes that are outside the isoprenoid pathway might also affect ?-carotene biosynthesis. To this end, here we provided an example that several novel gene targets, which are outside the isoprenoid pathway, have improving effects on ?-carotene synthesis in yeast cells, when they were over-expressed. Among these targets, the class E protein of the vacuolar protein-sorting pathway (Did2) led to the highest improvement in ?-carotene yields, which was 2.1-fold to that of the corresponding control. This improvement was further explained by the observation that the overexpression of the DID2 gene generally boosted the transcriptions of ?-carotene pathway genes. The mechanism by which the other targets improve the production of ?-carotene is discussed.

SUBMITTER: Li J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5471310 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature