You may be familiar with yeast as the organism content to turn carbs into products like bread and beer when left to ferment in the dark. In these cases, exposure to light can hinder or even spoil the process.
In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers in Georgia Tech's School of Biological Sciences have engineered one of the world's first strains of yeast that may be happier with the lights on.
"We were frankly shocked by how simple it was to turn the yeast into phototrophs (organisms that can harness and use energy from light)," says Anthony Burnetti, a research scientist working in Associate Professor William Ratcliff's laboratory and corresponding author of the study. "All we needed to do was move a single gene, and they grew 2% faster in the light than in the dark. Without any fine-tuning or careful coaxing, it just worked."
Easily equipping the yeast with such an evolutionarily important trait could mean big things for our understanding of how this trait originated -- and how it can be used to study things like biofuel production, evolution, and cellular aging.
Looking for an energy boost
The research was inspired by the group's past work investigating the evolution of multicellular life. The group published their first report on their Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE) in Nature last year, uncovering how their single-celled model organism, "snowflake yeast," was able to evolve multicellularity over 3,000 generations.
Throughout these evolution experiments, one major limitation for multicellular evolution appeared: energy.
"Oxygen has a hard time diffusing deep into tissues, and you get tissues without the ability to get energy as a result," says Burnetti. "I was looking for ways to get around this oxygen-based energy limitation."
One way to give organisms an energy boost without using oxygen is through light. But the ability to turn light into usable energy can be complicated from an evolutionary standpoint. For example, the molecular machinery that allows plants to use light for energy involves a host of genes and proteins that are hard to synthesize and transfer to other organisms -- both in the lab and naturally through evolution.
Luckily, plants are not the only organisms that can convert light to energy.
Keeping it simple
A simpler way for organisms to use light is with rhodopsins: proteins that can convert light into energy without additional cellular machinery.
"Rhodopsins are found all over the tree of life and apparently are acquired by organisms obtaining genes from each other over evolutionary time," says Autumn Peterson, a biology Ph.D. student working with Ratcliff and lead author of the study.
Source: ScienceDaily
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