Yeast epigenetics and its potential applications in biotechnology

Abstract

Epigenetic changes in the genome provide phenotypic plasticity without alteration of the DNA sequence. We show that benzoic acid, a common food additive and known histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi), has an epigenetic effect on Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Benzoic acid stimulated formation of epigenetic histone marks H3K4Me2, H3K27Me2, H3K18ac and H3Ser10p in yeast and altered their phenotypic behaviour, resulting in increased production of phenylethyl alcohol and ester compounds during alcoholic fermentation. Our study also demonstrates the HDACi activity of certain dietary compounds such as sodium butyrate, curcumin and anacardic acid, suggesting a potential use of these dietary compounds in altering yeast phenotypes without altering host-cell DNA. This study highlights the potential to use common dietary compounds to exploit epigenetic modifications for various fermentation and biotechnology applications as an alternative to genetic modification. Furthermore, we observed that H3K27me3 mark was downregulated and GCN4 gene was upregulated by benzoic acid. Both, downregulation of H3K27me3 mark and upregulation of GCN4 are known to play a crucial role in life span extension of Caenorhabditis elegans and S.cerevisiae respectively, indicating potential application of dietary HDACi in ageing science. Further research including the dissection of the epigenome of yeast cells treated with dietary HDACi using multiomics approach.