Design of Experiments Methodology to Build a Multifactorial Statistical Model Describing the Metabolic Interactions of Alcohol Dehydrogenase Isozymes in the Ethanol Biosynthetic Pathway of the Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Multifactorial approaches can quickly and efficiently model complex, interacting natural or engineered biological systems in a way that traditional one factor-at-a-time experimentation can fail to do. We applied a Design of Experiments (DOE) approach to model ethanol biosynthesis in yeast, which is well-understood and genetically tractable, yet complex. Six alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) isozymes catalyze ethanol synthesis, differing in their transcriptional and post-translational regulation, subcellular localization, and enzyme kinetics. We generated a combinatorial library of all ADH gene deletions and measured the impact of gene deletion(s) and environmental context on ethanol production of a subset of this library. The data were used to build a statistical model that described known behaviors of ADH isozymes and identified novel interactions. Importantly, the model described features of ADH metabolic behavior without explicit a priori knowledge. The method is therefore highly suited to understanding and optimizing metabolic pathways in less well-understood systems.