Pyruvate production in Candida glabrata: manipulation and optimization of physiological function

Abstract

Candida glabrata, a multi-vitamin auxotrophic yeast, can accumulate a large amount of pyruvate extracellularly using glucose as the carbon source, a characteristic that has facilitated the cost-effective biotechnological production of pyruvate on an industrial scale. In this review, we describe the current advances in further improving the performance of C. glabrata for efficient pyruvate production, which includes: optimization of the vitamin and dissolved oxygen concentrations, regulation of intracellular cofactor levels and improvement of the environmental robustness of C. glabrata. We also discuss the current efforts using systems biology to understand the metabolism of C. glabrata. Finally, perspectives on engineering and exploiting C. glabrata as a cell factory for efficiently producing various chemicals and materials are discussed.

• Candida glabrata
• dissolved oxygen
• environmental robustness
• intracellular cofactors
• pyruvate
• systems biology

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all our colleagues who provided material prior to publication.

Declaration of interest

This work was financially supported by the Technology Program of Wuxi City (Takemoto et al., 1997), the Program for the Eighth High-Level Talents in Six Major Talents Peak, Jiangsu Province (2011-NY033), the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-10-0456), the Jiangsu Province outstanding youth fund (BK2012002) and the Foundation for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of China (grant no. 200962).