Condition-specific promoter activities in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

BACKGROUND: Saccharomyces cerevisiae is widely studied for production of biofuels and biochemicals. To improve production efficiency under industrially relevant conditions, coordinated expression of multiple genes by manipulating promoter strengths is an efficient approach. It is known that gene expression is highly dependent on the practically used environmental conditions and is subject to dynamic changes. Therefore, investigating promoter activities of S. cerevisiae under different culture conditions in different time points, especially under stressful conditions is of great importance. RESULTS: In this study, the activities of various promoters in S. cerevisiae under stressful conditions and in the presence of xylose were characterized using yeast enhanced green fluorescent protein (yEGFP) as a reporter. The stresses include toxic levels of acetic acid and furfural, and high temperature, which are related to fermentation of lignocellulosic hydrolysates. In addition to investigating eight native promoters, the synthetic hybrid promoter P(3xC-TEF1) was also evaluated. The results revealed that P(TDH3) and the synthetic promoter P(3xC-TEF1) showed the highest strengths under almost all the conditions. Importantly, these two promoters also exhibited high stabilities throughout the cultivation. However, the strengths of P(ADH1) and P(PGK1), which are generally regarded as ‘constitutive’ promoters, decreased significantly under certain conditions, suggesting that cautions should be taken to use such constitutive promoters to drive gene expression under stressful conditions. Interestingly, P(HSP12) and P(HSP26) were able to response to both high temperature and acetic acid stress. Moreover, P(HSP12) also led to moderate yEGFP expression when xylose was used as the sole carbon source, indicating that this promoter could be used for inducing proper gene expression for xylose utilization. CONCLUSION: The results here revealed dynamic changes of promoter activities in S. cerevisiae throughout batch fermentation in the presence of inhibitors as well as using xylose. These results provide insights in selection of promoters to construct S. cerevisiae strains for efficient bioproduction under practical conditions. Our results also encouraged applications of synthetic promoters with high stability for yeast strain development. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12934-018-0899-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.