Lipidome variation of industrial Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains analyzed by LC-QTOF/MS-based untargeted lipidomics

Abstract

Although various yeast strains used in the food industry have been characterized by multilayer analysis, knowledge of the variation of lipid profiles involved in fermentation characteristics and stress tolerance remains in its infancy. In this study, untargeted lipidomics was applied to 10 yeast strains, including laboratory, baker's, wine, and sake yeasts, which exhibit distinct fermentation phenotypes, to obtain a comprehensive overview of the yeast lipidome. The relative standard deviation (RSD) in the abundance of the 352 identified lipid molecular species was investigated to reveal the specific and common lipids. Lipids containing very long-chain fatty acids and hydroxy long-chain fatty acids showed relatively large RSD, whereas lipids containing acyl chains, which are commonly found in yeast, such as C16-C18, showed less RSD among the 10 strains. Furthermore, principal component analysis of lipid profiles showed similar trends among industrial yeast strains. As lipids are involved in yeast phenotypes, including stress tolerance and fermentation characteristics, correlation analysis was performed with lipid abundance and phenotypes. The results revealed that molecular species with a high RSD in abundance among the 10 strains were correlated with specific stress tolerance and fermentation phenotypes.

Keywords: Industrial yeast; Liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight/mass spectrometry; Saccharomyces cerevisiae; Stress tolerance; Untargeted lipidomics.