Self-Establishing Communities: A Yeast Model to Study the Physiological Impact of Metabolic Cooperation in Eukaryotic Cells
Book chapter, 2019

All biosynthetically active cells are able to export and import metabolites, the small molecule intermediaries of metabolism. In dense cell populations, this hallmark of cells results in the intercellular exchange of a wide spectrum of metabolites. Such metabolite exchange enables metabolic specialization of individual cells, leading to far reaching biological implications, as a consequence of the intrinsic connection between metabolism and cell physiology. In this chapter, we discuss methods on how to study metabolite exchange interactions by using self-establishing metabolically cooperating communities (SeMeCos) in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. SeMeCos exploit the stochastic segregation of episomes to progressively increase the number of essential metabolic interdependencies in a community that grows out from an initially prototrophic cell. By coupling genotype to metabotype, SeMeCos allow for the tracking of cells while they specialize metabolically and hence the opportunity to study their progressive change in physiology.

Metabolic cooperation

Yeast communities

Metabolic specialization

Author

Kate Campbell

Chalmers, Biology and Biological Engineering, Systems and Synthetic Biology

Clara Correia-Melo

The Francis Crick Institute

University of Cambridge

M. Ralser

The Francis Crick Institute

Charité University Medicine Berlin

Methods in Molecular Biology

10643745 (ISSN) 1940-6029 (eISSN)

263-282

Subject Categories

Cell Biology

Other Medical Biotechnology

Medical Biotechnology (with a focus on Cell Biology (including Stem Cell Biology), Molecular Biology, Microbiology, Biochemistry or Biopharmacy)

DOI

10.1007/978-1-4939-9736-7_16

PubMed

31602617

More information

Latest update

3/21/2023