Yeastscent – Exploring the Volatile Metabolite Space of Saccharomyces Cerevisiae

As a model organism for eukaryotic research and important industrial cell factory Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one of the best studied microorganisms. However, volatile organic compounds, which are produced and emitted during fermentation of this microbe, were so far widely neglected in yeast research – an exception being compounds affecting the flavor of wine, beer or dough. This lack of knowledge can be attributed to the analytical methods that have to be employed studying volatile analytes as sample preparation of gaseous chemicals requires additional care. In addition, the limited knowledge of the biochemistry and genetics involved in the formation of volatile metabolites hinder the general incorporation in systems biology studies.

Here, we set forth to elucidate the volatile metabolite repertoire of S. cerevisiae and the corresponding biochemical pathways by applying constraint-based metabolic modeling approaches to infer possible biosynthesis routes and systems-level analyses, i.e. online head-space analysis of S. cerevisiae fermentations, metabolite profiling, transcriptome and ¹³C tracer based metabolic flux analyses for experimental verification of predicted pathways. The gained knowledge will be used to comprehend the current S. cerevisiae's metabolic and regulatory network.

Furthermore, we hypothesize that volatile metabolites can be used as proxies for the metabolic state of and ultimately aim to use online measurements of key volatiles to fed a dynamic flux balance analysis model, which will be used for controlling yeast fermentation, thereby contributing to the efficiency of baker's yeast production.