Bioremediation of heavy metal pollution with biomaterials such as bacteria and fungi usually suffer from limitations because of microbial sensitivity to high concentration of heavy metals. Herein, we adopted a novel random mutagenesis technique called RAISE to manipulate the transcription regulator SPT3 of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to improve cell lead tolerance. The best strain Mutant VI was selected from the random mutagenesis libraries on account of the growth performance, with higher specific growth rate than the control strain (0.068 vs. 0.040 h-1) at lead concentration as high as 1.8 g/L. Combined with the transcriptome analysis of S. cerevisiae, expressing the SPT3 protein was performed to make better sense of the global regulatory effects of SPT3. The data analysis revealed that 57 of S. cerevisiae genes were induced and 113 genes were suppressed, ranging from those for trehalose synthesis, carbon metabolism, and nucleotide synthesis to lead resistance. Especially, the accumulation of intracellular trehalose in S. cerevisiae under certain conditions of stress is considered important to lead resistance. The above results represented that SPT3 was acted as global transcription regulator in the exponential phase of strain and accordingly improved heavy metal tolerance in the heterologous host S. cerevisiae. The present study provides a route to complex phenotypes that are not readily accessible by traditional methods.
Keywords: Lead tolerance; RAISE method; RNA-seq; SPT3; Saccharomyces cerevisiae.