Abstract
BackgroundThe brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is exploited in several industrial processes, ranging from food and beverage fermentation to the production of biofuels, pharmaceuticals and complex chemicals. The large genetic and phenotypic diversity within this species offers a formidable natural resource to obtain superior strains, hybrids, and variants. However, most industrially relevant traits in S. cerevisiae strains are controlled by multiple genetic loci. Over the past years, several studies have identified some of these QTLs. However, because these studies only focus on a limited set of traits and often use different techniques and starting strains, a global view of industrially relevant QTLs is still missing.ResultsHere, we combined the power of 1125 fully sequenced inbred segregants with high-throughput phenotyping methods to identify as many as 678 QTLs across 18 different traits relevant to industrial fermentation processes, including production of ethanol, glycerol, isobutanol, acetic acid, sulfur dioxide, flavor-active esters, as well as resistance to ethanol, acetic acid, sulfite and high osmolarity. We identified and confirmed several variants that are associated with multiple different traits, indicating that many QTLs are pleiotropic. Moreover, we show that both rare and common variants, as well as variants located in coding and non-coding regions all contribute to the phenotypic variation.ConclusionsOur findings represent an important step in our understanding of the genetic underpinnings of industrially relevant yeast traits and open new routes to study complex genetics and genetic interactions as well as to engineer novel, superior industrial yeasts. Moreover, the major role of rare variants suggests that there is a plethora of different combinations of mutations that can be explored in genome editing.
Highlights
The brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is exploited in several industrial processes, ranging from food and beverage fermentation to the production of biofuels, pharmaceuticals and complex chemicals
The main aim of this study was to obtain a comprehensive view of the different quantitative trait loci (QTL) that contribute to industrially relevant properties in S. cerevisiae
We reasoned that this combination of one industrial, and one non-industrial strain would maximize our chances of identifying QTLs that are specific for strains adapted to industrial conditions, while possibly revealing to what extent non-industrial strains harbor other industrially relevant alleles
Summary
The brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is exploited in several industrial processes, ranging from food and beverage fermentation to the production of biofuels, pharmaceuticals and complex chemicals. The brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae plays a key role in the production of fermented foods, beverages, biofuels and pharmaceuticals. Aside from selecting natural strains that boast a desirable combination of phenotypes, it is possible to cross multiple strains and select hybrids that combine and improve upon specific traits [7,8,9]. This approach has proven extremely powerful, it suffers from important shortcomings. While hybrids allow combining useful traits, the very process of shuffling genomes is relatively slow and labor-intensive, and inevitably leads to loss of some positive properties
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