Tuesday, July 28, 2009 - 8:30 AM
S63
Energy metabolism as a driver for ethanol production in yeast
Goutham Vemuri, Department of Systems Biology, Chalmers University of Technology, Kemivagen 10, Goteborg, 412 96, Sweden
The baking and brewing yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has been used to produce ethanol for beverages and biofuel. The genetic characteristics that make this yeast such an efficient brewer remains unclear. With modern technology and sophisticated computational tools, we are now in a position to understand yeast than ever before. Using these data, we revisit the old problem of overflow metabolism in S. cerevisiae. We collected over 400 gene expression data sets from public repositories that cover a wide range of conditions. We used supervised machine learning method, called support vector machines to identify patterns of genes that are differentially expressed during ethanol production. The gene subsets were selected using a genetic algorithm. After 1000 iterations, this hybrid algorithm identified a subset of 84 genes whose expression was related to ethanol production. These genes were predominantly involved in energy metabolism. Comparative genomics revealed that these genes evolved significantly faster than the rest of the genome. These results together indicate that S. cerevisiae produces ethanol in order to increase its ATP production rate. Therefore, faster ATP production appears to be the driving force behind S. cerevisiae producing ethanol. We conclude ethanol production by yeast is not a local property of alcohol dehydrogenase, but rather a complex systemic property that has been evolved to perfection for many millions of years.
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See more of Invited Oral Papers
See more of The Annual Meeting and Exhibition 2009 (July 26 - 30, 2009)