Researchers have made one type of yeast a little less dependent on carbs by enabling it to use light as energy.
Yeast are carb lovers, sustaining themselves by fermenting sugars and starches from sources such as dough, grapes, and grains, with bread, wine, and beer as happy byproducts.
But the chlorophyll complex requires many other molecules to do its job. So Anthony Burnetti, a geneticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Georgia Tech evolutionary biologist William Ratcliff sought a simpler solution. They homed in on a protein known as rhodopsin, which doesn’t require a large molecular entourage.
Burnetti wondered whether light energy could do that job instead. But the team’s first effort misfired when the rhodopsin protein made by the gene went to a different compartment known not for protein degradation, but for protein synthesis. So Burnetti looked instead for rhodopsin already known to exist in vacuoles. He settled on using one from corn smut, a fungal pathogen.
Burnetti and his colleagues think light induces the rhodopsin to pump more protons into the vacuole, relieving the cells’ need to expend ATP for this task and instead freeing up that energy to help the cell grow in other ways. Increasing the acidity inside the vacuole may decrease it outside the vacuole, causing enzymes there to work faster and wear out sooner, which may also help explain the higher death rate among these altered cells.
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