Dynamic Transcriptomic Data Reveal Unexpected Regulatory Behavior of Scheffersomyces Stipitis

Abstract

The rapid developments in “omics” technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to help understand cellular metabolisms at genome-scale. Among different “omics” data, RNA-seq based transcriptome profiling has been used to enhance the understanding of the genome-scale response of the organism to different stimuli. While these studies have provided insightful findings, they are most often limited to studying two-steady-state conditions. From a control perspective, as cellular metabolism is a highly complex dynamic system, the transient response could offer significantly more information on the cellular metabolism, particularly on potential gene regulatory mechanisms. In this work, we present our initial results on analyzing the dynamic transcriptomic profiles of Scheffersomyces stipitis during the transition from aerobic growth to oxygen-limited fermentation. Our results confirm that the transient states indeed offer important and significantly more information than that provided by the steady-states alone. In addition, the transient transcriptomic data revealed interesting regulatory behavior that was not expected before, which could offer crucial insight in understanding the cellular metabolism