Genome-scale metabolic construction of the stress-tolerant hybrid yeast Zygosaccharomyces parabailii

Abstract

Genome-scale metabolic models are powerful tools to understand and engineer cellular systems facilitating their use as cell factories. This is especially true for microorganisms with known genome sequences from which nearly complete sets of enzymes and metabolic pathways are determined, or can be inferred. Yeasts are highly diverse eukaryotes whose metabolic traits have long been exploited in industry, and although many of their genome sequences are available, few genome-scale metabolic models have so far been produced. For the first time, we reconstructed the genome-scale metabolic model of the hybrid yeast Zygosaccharomyces parabailii, which is a member of the Z. bailii sensu lato clade notorious for stress-tolerance and therefore relevant to industry. The model comprises 3096 reactions, 2091 metabolites, and 2413 genes. Our own laboratory data were then used to establish a biomass synthesis reaction, and constrain the extracellular environment. Through constraint-based modeling, our model reproduces the co-consumption and catabolism of acetate and glucose posing it as a promising platform for understanding and exploiting the metabolic potential of Z. parabailii.