MARY · Metabolic Adaptation and Resilience in the face of a changing environment
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-08-22 → 2024-12-11
- EU contribution
- €212,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Metabolic Adaptation and Resilience in the face of a changing environment
The MARY project set out to explore the mechanisms of metabolic resilience and adaptation in yeast, focusing on how cells respond to diverse environmental and genetic challenges. Metabolic resilience, the ability of an organism to maintain and reorganize its metabolism in the face of stress or change, is fundamental to the survival and functionality of living systems. Understanding these processes has significant implications for both science and industry, as it sheds light on cellular homeostasis, evolutionary biology, and the potential to engineer microbial systems for biotechnological applications. The study of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), a model organism with well-characterized genetics and broad industrial utility, provided an ideal framework for this research. Yeast is critical to industries such as bioethanol production, pharmaceuticals, and food fermentation, and optimizing its performance under variable conditions could lead to significant economic and environmental benefits. Moreover, investigating how yeast adapts to genetic diversity and environmental fluctuations has the potential to illuminate general principles of cellular adaptation that apply to more complex organisms, including humans. The overarching objectives of the MARY project were to: 1. Investigate the relationship between metabolic resource allocation, protein dynamics, and environmental niches, using genetically diverse yeast strains to identify how these factors contribute to metabolic resilience. 2. Explore the regulatory mechanisms underlying metabolic adaptation, focusing on how genetic and environmental inputs drive changes at the proteomic and metabolic levels. 3. Develop new approaches and datasets that contribute to the predictive modeling of strain fitness and metabolic behavior, leveraging multi-omics integration and advanced computational methods. These objectives address critical scientific and societal needs by providing insights into the adaptability of living systems and offering tools to optimize microbial performance in industrial processes. By bridging gaps in our understanding of metabolic resilience, the project contributes to advancing biotechnology, improving sustainable production methods, and enhancing our knowledge of cellular adaptation.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Microbes have evolved to make the best use of their environmental resources while retaining sufficient adaptive capacity to cope with changing conditions. However, even simple changes in the environment require major cellular rearrangements, that manifest in the transcriptome, proteome and metabolome of the cell. For instance, a change in the availability of just four non-essential nutrients affects expression of 2/3rds of all yeast genes. In essence, we do not understand the key molecular mechanisms that govern such huge plasticity, which buffering mechanisms prevent the collapse of the cellular system, and how an optimal resource allocation is achieved to allow cells to thrive in so many environments. In this project, we will analyse a large collection of yeast wild isolates grown in conditions that resemble different ecological niches. We will identify the key molecular pathways that enable environmental adaption. Thanks to unique high-throughput capacities of the host laboratory, I will be able to record proteomes, metabolomes and growth properties of the wild yeast strains. I’ll link these molecular datasets to fitness and metabolism. My background being in big data analysis and network modelling, I will use genome-scale metabolic models and machine-learning to characterize how changes in protein resource allocation impact the distribution of metabolic flux in such context, and define, what are the regulatory mechanisms influencing metabolism at its different levels. Eventually, the knowledge gained will enable me to build a predictive model to understand the drivers of adaptations to ecological niche. By deepening our understanding of the mechanisms behind metabolic niche adaptation, this project will not only answer fundamental questions about the inner working of the cell but will also increase our ability to engineer yeast for biotechnological applications and to understand the problematic resilience of fungal pathogens to therapeutic interventions.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD · OxfordCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union