Comparison of the metabolic response to over-production of p-coumaric acid in two yeast strains

We aimed to study how production of p-coumaric acid, a precursor of multiple secondary aromatic metabolites, influences the cellular metabolism of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We evaluated the growth and p-coumaric acid production in batch and chemostat cultivations and analyzed the transcriptome and intracellular metabolome during steady state in low- and high-producers of p-coumaric acid in two strain backgrounds, S288c or CEN.PK. For analysis of the differential gene expression, we did pairwise comparisons between the optimized and non-optimized strains for p-CA production: CEN.PK strains (ST4288 and ST4408) and the S288c strains (ST4353 and ST4397). Transcriptome analysis showed that the CEN.PK strain was less affected by engineering towards higher p-CA production than the S288c strain, as the number of significantly up-/down-regulated genes was correspondingly 652 and 1927 amongst others, strain S288c had downregulations in gene sets involved in amino acid and protein biosynthesis. This suggests that CEN.PK may be a better platform strain for production of aromatic compounds than the S288c strain.