Increasing galactose consumption by Saccharomyces cerevisiae through metabolic engineering of the GAL gene regulatory network

Increasing the flux through central carbon metabolism is difficult because of rigidity in regulatory structures, at both the genetic and the enzymatic levels. Here we describe metabolic engineering of a regulatory network to obtain a balanced increase in the activity of all the enzymes in the pathway, and ultimately, increasing metabolic flux through the pathway of interest. By manipulating the GAL gene regulatory network of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is a tightly regulated system, we produced prototroph mutant strains, which increased the flux through the galactose utilization pathway by eliminating three known negative regulators of the GAL system: Gal6, Gal80, and Mig1. This led to a 41% increase in flux through the galactose utilization pathway compared with the wild-type strain. This is of significant interest within the field of biotechnology since galactose is present in many industrial media. The improved galactose consumption of the gal mutants did not favor biomass formation, but rather caused excessive respiro-fermentative metabolism, with the ethanol production rate increasing linearly with glycolytic flux.