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Stress tolerance and growth physiology of yeast strains from the Brazilian fuel ethanol industry

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Abstract

Improved biofuels production requires a better understanding of industrial microorganisms. Some wild Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains, isolated from the fuel ethanol industry in Brazil, present exceptional fermentation performance, persistence and prevalence in the harsh industrial environment. Nevertheless, their physiology has not yet been systematically investigated. Here we present a first systematic evaluation of the widely used industrial strains PE-2, CAT-1, BG-1 and JP1, in terms of their tolerance towards process-related stressors. We also analyzed their growth physiology under heat stress. These strains were evaluated in parallel to laboratory and baker’s strains. Whereas the industrial strains performed in general better than the laboratory strains under ethanol or acetic acid stresses and on industrial media, high sugar stress was tolerated equally by all strains. Heat and low pH stresses clearly distinguished fuel ethanol strains from the others, indicating that these conditions might be the ones that mostly exert selective pressure on cells in the industrial environment. During shake-flask cultivations using a synthetic medium at 37 °C, industrial strains presented higher ethanol yields on glucose than the laboratory strains, indicating that they could have been selected for this trait—a response to energy-demanding fermentation conditions. These results might be useful to guide future improvements of large-scale fuel ethanol production via engineering of stress tolerance traits in other strains, and eventually also for promoting the use of these fuel ethanol strains in different industrial bioprocesses.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP, São Paulo, Brazil) for the financial support to this research, which was carried out within the BIOEN framework (grant 2007/59776-7). We also acknowledge financial support from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq, Brasília, Brazil). During her Ph.D. studies, the first author received grants from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES, Brasília, Brazil), from CNPq and from FAPESP (grant 2010/07187-0). We are thankful to the researchers named on Table 1, for providing us with the strains necessary for this study, to Prof. Dr. Maria Elena Taqueda, for helping with statistical analysis, and to Natalia Perrella and Lirian Aranda, for their help in the experiments. The authors confirm that there are no Conflicts of Interest involved in this work.

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  1. A. K. Gombert

    Present address: Faculty of Food Engineering and Bioenergy Laboratory, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Rua Monteiro Lobato, 80, Campinas, SP, 13083-862, Brazil

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  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of São Paulo, PO Box 61548, São Paulo, SP, 05424-970, Brazil

    B. E. Della-Bianca & A. K. Gombert

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Della-Bianca, B.E., Gombert, A.K. Stress tolerance and growth physiology of yeast strains from the Brazilian fuel ethanol industry. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 104, 1083–1095 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-013-0030-2

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