Exploiting the Diversity of Saccharomycotina Yeasts To Engineer Biotin-Independent Growth of Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Abstract

The reported metabolic engineering strategy to enable optimal growth in the absence of biotin is of direct relevance for large-scale industrial applications of S. cerevisiae . Important benefits of biotin prototrophy include cost reduction during the preparation of chemically defined industrial growth media as well as a lower susceptibility of biotin-prototrophic strains to contamination by auxotrophic microorganisms. The observed oxygen dependency of biotin synthesis by the engineered strains is relevant for further studies on the elucidation of fungal biotin biosynthesis pathways.