Spontaneously established syntrophic yeast communities improve bioproduction
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Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Nutritional co-dependence (syntrophy) is observed in natural microbial communities and has underexplored potential to improve biotechnological processes by using cooperating cell types. So far, design of yeast syntrophic communities has required extensive genetic manipulation, as the co-inoculation of most eukaryotic microbial auxotrophs does not result in cooperative growth. Here we employ high throughput phenotypic screening to systematically test pairwise combinations of auxotrophic S. cerevisiae deletion mutants from a genome-scale knock-out library. While most auxotrophic co-culture pairs indeed do not enter syntrophic growth, we identify 49 auxotroph pairs which defy the general rule and spontaneously form syntrophic, synergistic communities. We then characterise the stability of nine selected co-cultures and show that initial inoculation ratios of co-cultured populations significantly influence growth dynamics. We demonstrate that a pair of tryptophan auxotrophs grow by exchanging a pathway intermediate rather than the end product indicating that the metabolic space for metabolic interactions is larger than currently assumed. Exploiting this observation, we introduced a malonic semialdehyde biosynthesis pathway split between different pairs of auxotrophs, including the tryptophan auxotrophs, and obtained a 6-fold increase in relative production titer of a biotechnologically relevant compound. Our results report the spontaneous formation of stable syntrophy in a specific subset of S. cerevisiae auxotrophs and illustrate the biotechnological potential of dividing labour between a naturally cooperating intraspecies community.
Date Issued
2023-05-29
Date Acceptance
2023-04-14
Citation
Nature Chemical Biology, 2023, 19, pp.951-961
ISSN
1552-4450
Publisher
Nature Research
Start Page
951
End Page
961
Journal / Book Title
Nature Chemical Biology
Volume
19
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-023-01341-2
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2023-05-29