Adaptive evolution of Saccharomyces cerevisiae with enhanced ethanol tolerance for Chinese rice wine fermentation

High tolerance towards ethanol is a desirable property for the Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains used in the alcoholic beverage industry. To improve the ethanol tolerance of an industrial Chinese rice wine yeast, a sequential batch fermentation strategy was used to adaptively evolve a chemically mutagenized Chinese rice wine G85 strain. The high level of ethanol produced under Chinese rice wine-like fermentation conditions was used as the selective pressure. After adaptive evolution of approximately 200 generations, mutant G85X-8 was isolated and shown to have markedly increased ethanol tolerance. The evolved strain also showed higher osmotic and temperature tolerances than the parental strain. Laboratory Chinese rice wine fermentation showed that the evolved G85X-8 strain was able to catabolize sugars more completely than the parental G85 strain. A higher level of yeast cell activity was found in the fermentation mash produced by the evolved strain, but the aroma profiles were similar between the evolved and parental strains. The improved ethanol tolerance in the evolved strain might be ascribed to the altered fatty acids composition of the cell membrane and higher intracellular trehalose concentrations. These results suggest that adaptive evolution is an efficient approach for the non-recombinant modification of industrial yeast strains.