Benchmarking two commonly used Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains for heterologous vanillin-β-glucoside production

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a widely used eukaryotic model organism and a key cell factory for production of biofuels and wide range of chemicals. From the broad palette of available yeast strains, the most popular are those derived from laboratory strain S288c and the industrially relevant CEN.PK strain series. Importantly, in recent years these two strains have been subjected to comparative “-omics” analyzes pointing out significant genotypic and phenotypic differences. It is therefore possible that the two strains differ significantly with respect to their potential as cell factories for production of specific compounds. To examine this possibility, we have reconstructed a de novo vanillin-β-glucoside pathway in an identical manner in S288c and CEN.PK strains. Characterization of the two resulting strains in two standard conditions revealed that the S288c background strain produced up to 10-fold higher amounts of vanillin-β-glucoside compared to CEN.PK. This study demonstrates that yeast strain background may play a major role in the outcome of newly developed cell factories for production of a given product.