Transcriptomic profiling of S. cerevisiae and S. boulardii during growth in host-related conditions

In this study, the hypothesis that the different phenotypes exhibited by S. cerevisiae and S. boulardii lay on differential gene expression, based on promoter sequencing variability, is approached. To test this possibility, S. boulardii and S. cerevisiae were grown in intestinal like medium (ILM), optimized to enable the growth of both strains, and their transcriptome-wide expression patterns were evaluated through RNA-sequencing. mRNA profiles were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina NextSeq. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were analyzed with TopHat followed by HTSeq. RNA-seq data allowed to identify genes whose expression is differentially regulated in both organisms with a log2fold change ≥1 and p value <0.01. The RNA-Seq data was also used to refine the current S. boulardii annotation.