"Glucose and ethanol-dependent transcriptional regulation of the astaxanthin biosynthesis pathway in Xanthophyllomyces dendrorhous"

BMC Microbiology

Research Article

Aniela Wozniak¹  Víctor Cifuentes¹  Mauricio Niklitschek¹  Marcelo Baeza¹  Andrés Marcoleta¹  Carla Lozano¹  Jennifer Alcaíno¹ 

[1] Departamento de Ciencias Ecológicas y Centro de Biotecnología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Las Palmeras 3425, 7800024, Ñuñoa, Santiago, Chile;

关键词: Carotenoid;    Astaxanthin;    Phytoene;    Carotenoid Biosynthesis;    Alternative Transcript;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2180-11-190

 received in 2011-03-11, accepted in 2011-08-23,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe yeast Xanthophyllomyces dendrorhous is one of the most promising and economically attractive natural sources of astaxanthin. The biosynthesis of this valuable carotenoid is a complex process for which the regulatory mechanisms remain mostly unknown. Several studies have shown a strong correlation between the carbon source present in the medium and the amount of pigments synthesized. Carotenoid production is especially low when high glucose concentrations are used in the medium, while a significant increase is observed with non-fermentable carbon sources. However, the molecular basis of this phenomenon has not been established.ResultsIn this work, we showed that glucose caused transcriptional repression of the three genes involved in the synthesis of astaxanthin from geranylgeranyl pyrophosphate in X. dendrorhous, which correlates with a complete inhibition of pigment synthesis. Strikingly, this regulatory response was completely altered in mutant strains that are incapable of synthesizing astaxanthin. However, we found that addition of ethanol caused the induction of crtYB and crtS gene expression and promoted de novo synthesis of carotenoids. The induction of carotenogenesis was noticeable as early as 24 h after ethanol addition.ConclusionFor the first time, we demonstrated that carbon source-dependent regulation of astaxanthin biosynthesis in X. dendrorhous involves changes at the transcriptional level. Such regulatory mechanism provides an explanation for the strong and early inhibitory effect of glucose on the biosynthesis of this carotenoid.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Marcoleta et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.