Project description:Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 is a facultative anaerobe that grows by respiration using a variety of electron acceptors. This organism serves as a model to study how bacteria thrive in redox-stratified environments. A glucose-utilizing engineered derivative of MR-1 has been reported to be unable to grow in glucose minimal medium (GMM) in the absence of electron acceptors, despite this strain having a complete set of genes for reconstructing glucose to lactate fermentative pathways. To gain insights into why MR-1 is incapable of fermentative growth, this study examined a hypothesis that this strain is programmed to repress the expression of some carbon metabolic genes in the absence of electron acceptors. Comparative transcriptomic analyses of the MR-1 derivative were conducted in the presence and absence of fumarate as an electron acceptor, and these found that the expression of many genes involved in carbon metabolism required for cell growth, including several tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle genes, was significantly downregulated in the absence of fumarate. This finding suggests a possibility that MR-1 is unable to grow fermentatively on glucose in minimal media owing to the shortage of nutrients essential for cell growth, such as amino acids. This idea was demonstrated in subsequent experiments that showed that the MR-1 derivative fermentatively grows in GMM containing tryptone or a defined mixture of amino acids. We suggest that gene regulatory circuits in MR-1 are tuned to minimize energy consumption under electron acceptor-depleted conditions, and that this results in defective fermentative growth in minimal media. IMPORTANCE It is an enigma why S. oneidensis MR-1 is incapable of fermentative growth despite having complete sets of genes for reconstructing fermentative pathways. Understanding the molecular mechanisms behind this defect will facilitate the development of novel fermentation technologies for the production of value-added chemicals from biomass feedstocks, such as electro-fermentation. The information provided in this study will also improve our understanding of the ecological strategies of bacteria living in redox-stratified environments.
Project description:Pathogens that grow during infections must cope with the reactive oxygen species (ROS) released by host immune cells. Among the different strategies to prevent oxidative damage during infections, pathogenic bacteria have evolved mechanisms to reduce respiration and other cellular processes that are particularly sensitive to free radicals, obtaining energy preferentially by undergoing to fermentative metabolism. As fermentation produces fewer ATP per glucose than respiration, bacteria ensure an appropriate supply of energy by increasing the glycolytic flux. The opportunistic human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus is one such microbe but the underlying mechanism that enables S. aureus to induce fermentation during infections is still unclear. Here we show that the ComK-like regulator of natural competence that is present in many gram-positive bacteria is crucial to redirect S. aureus metabolism to fermentation during infection. ComK is cryptic in laboratory conditions but highly induced during infections or in response to infection-related cues, such as ROS. ComK induces the glycolytic flux and glucose consumption rate, a key step to redirect ATP production to fermentation. This licenses fermenting S. aureus to reduce oxidative damage while increasing DNA uptake by natural transformation. As a consequence, a comK-defective mutant shows an accumulation of ROS as well as DNA mutations that lower bacterial survival. This mutant shows no distinctive phenotype in laboratory conditions but is unable to cause infection in vertebrates or invertebrate infection models. ComK-mediated synchronization of natural transformation to fermentative metabolism may allow S. aureus, and probably other gram-positive bacteria, to use the fermentation acid end products to eliminate bacterial competitors while assimilating their DNA. Assimilated DNA may serve as a source of nucleotides for DNA repair or to promote genetic variability, thereby enabling a successful host colonization of this bacterium.
Project description:Purpose: The ability to rationally manipulate the transcriptional states of cells would be of great use in medicine and bioengineering. We have developed a novel algorithm, NetSurgeon, which utilizes genome-wide gene regulatory networks to identify interventions that force a cell toward a desired expression state. Results: We used NetSurgeon to select transcription factor deletions aimed at improving ethanol production in S. cerevisiae cultures that are catabolizing xylose. We reasoned that interventions that move the transcriptional states of cells utilizing xylose toward the fermentative state typical of cells that are producing ethanol rapidly (while utilizing glucose) might improve xylose fermentation. Some of the interventions selected by NetSurgeon successfully promoted a fermentative transcriptional state in the absence of glucose, resulting in strains with a 2.7-fold increase in xylose import rates, a 4-fold improvement in xylose integration into central carbon metabolism, or a 1.3-fold increase in ethanol production rate. Conclusions: We conclude by presenting an integrated model of transcriptional regulation and metabolic flux that will enable future metabolic engineering efforts aimed at improving xylose fermentation to prioritize functional regulators of central carbon metabolism.
Project description:The capacity of respiring cultures of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to instantaneously switch to fast alcoholic fermentation upon a transfer to anaerobic sugar-excess conditions is a key characteristic of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in many of its industrial applications. This transition was studied by exposing aerobic glucose-limited chemostat cultures grown at a low specific growth rate to two simultaneous perturbations: oxygen depletion and relief of glucose limitation. This shift towards fully fermentative conditions caused a massive transcriptional response, where one third of all genes within the genome were transcribed differentially. During the first 30 min, most of these changes were driven by relief from glucose limitation. An anaerobic induction response was only observed after the initial response to glucose excess. By comparing this study with public datasets representing dynamic and steady conditions, 14 up-regulated and 11 down-regulated genes were determined to be anaerobiosis specific and can therefore be use as âsignatureâ transcripts for anaerobicity under dynamic as well as under steady state conditions Experiment Overall Design: To invoke rapid and full induction of fermentative capacity, respiratory, aerobic glucose-limited chemostat cultures (D=0.1â¢h-1) were shifted to fully fermentative conditions by sudden depletion of oxygen and addition of glucose. The glucose was added two min after sparging the continuous culture with pure nitrogen, when the dissolved oxygen concentration had decreased from 75-80% to 10-15% of air saturation. Samples for micro-arrays were taken for each time point after the perturbation (5, 10, 30, 60 and 120 min) from two independently cultured replicates, while steady state data were taken from three independent chemostats. The complete dataset therefore comprised 13 samples.
Project description:The ability of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to convert glucose, even in the presence of oxygen, via glycolysis and the fermentative pathway to ethanol has played an important role in its domestication. Despite the extensive knowledge on these pathways in S. cerevisiae, relatively little is known about these pathways in other industrially-relevant Saccharomyces yeast species. In this study we explore the diversity of the glycolytic and fermentative pathways within the Saccharomyces genus using S. cerevisiae, S. kudriavzevii and S. eubayanus as paradigms. Sequencing data revealed a highly conserved genetic makeup of the glycolytic and fermentative pathways in the three species in terms of number of paralogous genes. Although promoter regions were less conserved between the three species as compared to coding sequences, binding sites for Rap1, Gcr1 and Abf1, main transcriptional regulators of glycolytic and fermentative genes, were highly conserved. Transcriptome profiling of these three strains grown in aerobic batch cultivation in chemically defined medium with glucose as carbon source, revealed a remarkably similar expression of the glycolytic and fermentative genes across species, and the conserved classification of genes into major and minor paralogs. Furthermore, transplantation of the promoters of major paralogs of S. kudriavzevii and S. eubayanus into S. cerevisiae demonstrated not only the transferability of these promoters, but also the similarity of their strength and response to various environmental stimuli. The relatively low homology of S. kudriavzevii and S. eubayanus promoters to their S. cerevisiae relatives makes them very attractive alternatives for strain construction in S. cerevisiae, thereby expanding S. cerevisiae molecular toolbox.