Construction of a metabolome library for transcription factor-related single gene mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Transcription factors (TFs) play an important role in gene regulation, providing control for cells to adapt to ever changing environments and different physiological states. Although great effort has been taken to study TFs through DNA-protein binding and microarray gene expression experiments, the understanding of transcriptional regulation is still lacking, due to lack of information that links TF regulatory events and final phenotypic change. Here, we focused on metabolites as the final readouts of gene transcription process. We performed metabolite profiling of 154 Saccharomyces cerevisiae's single gene knockouts each defective in a gene encoding transcription factor and built a metabolome library consists of 84 metabolites with good reproducibility. Using the metabolome dataset, we obtained significant correlations and identified differential strains that exhibit altered metabolism compared to control. This work presents a novel metabolome dataset library which will be invaluable for researchers working on transcriptional regulation and yeast biology in general.