Remember the metabolic engineering work in S. cerevisiae based on auxin-mediated protein degradation of the lab of Claudia Vickers from the University of Queensland, Brisbane?  They once disclosed in Nat. Commun. 2021 very elegant strategies for metabolic engineering (e.g., flux redirecting, metabolic modulation) in yeast.  Selective degradation of essential proteins indeed allowed them to redirect metabolic flux and modulate metabolism in terpene-producing yeast strains.  Labeling with FAST of The Twinkle Factory then allowed them to observe single cell level changes in the induction of the GAL promoter in engineered S. cerevisiae strains.

FAST in S. cerevisiae

FAST in S. cerevisiae in ACS Synth. Biol.

Now Bingyin Peng et al. report in ACS Synth. Biol. 2024 their investigations around the above observed phenotypic diversity and its genetic origin.  Namely they show that multiple factors, including plasmid integration status, subchromosomal location, gene copy number, sesquiterpene synthase expression level, and genome rearrangement, together play a complicated determinant role on the productivities of sesquiterpene product. FAST labeling and fluorescence reporting are key in their work thanks to the quantitative correlation between FAST expression and fluorescence.  As a result they were able to investigate and establish the variety of genetic constructs in their strains.  This work hence fortunately expands the toolbox for metabolic engineering in S. cerevisiae, a key candidate for synthetic biology.

The Twinkle Factory supplies commercial fluorogens for FAST and splitFAST.

Stain different, tag FAST!