Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 22, 2025

Determination of the Mating Efficiency of Haploids in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Published on: December 2, 2022
A Pan-Draft Metabolic Model Reflects Evolutionary Diversity across 332 Yeast Species
Hongzhong Lu1, Eduard J Kerkhoven2, Jens Nielsen2,3
1State Key Laboratory of Microbial Metabolism, School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
Abstract:
Yeasts are increasingly employed in synthetic biology as chassis strains, including conventional and non-conventional species. It is still unclear how genomic evolution determines metabolic diversity among various yeast species and strains. In this study, we constructed draft GEMs for 332 yeast species using two alternative procedures from the toolbox RAVEN v 2.0. We found that draft GEMs could reflect the difference in yeast metabolic potentials, and therefore, could be utilized to probe the evolutionary trend of metabolism among 332 yeast species. We created a pan-draft metabolic model to account for the metabolic capacity of every sequenced yeast species by merging all draft GEMs. Further analysis showed that the pan-reactome of yeast has a "closed" property, which confirmed the great conservatism that exists in yeast metabolic evolution. Lastly, the quantitative correlations among trait similarity, evolutionary distances, genotype, and model similarity were thoroughly investigated. The results suggest that the evolutionary distance and genotype, to some extent, determine model similarity, but not trait similarity, indicating that multiple mechanisms shape yeast trait evolution. A large-scale reconstruction and integrative analysis of yeast draft GEMs would be a valuable resource to probe the evolutionary mechanism behind yeast trait variety and to further refine the existing yeast species-specific GEMs for the community.
Related Concept Videos
Diversity of Archaea II
Diversity of Archaea I
Diversity of Archaea III
Diversity of Archaea IV
Diversity of Protists II
Diversity of Protists IV

