The brewer's yeast Saccharomyces pastorianus originated as a hybrid between the mesophilic yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and cryotolerant yeast Saccharomyces eubayanus. In this study, we investigated temperature-dependent changes in lipid composition in three yeast species using untargeted lipidomics. We found that both S. cerevisiae and S. pastorianus accumulated storage lipids, particularly triacylglycerols (TG), as the temperature decreased, whereas TG levels in S. eubayanus showed slight temperature-dependent changes. Mitochondria-associated lipids, such as cardiolipin (CL) and its precursor phosphatidylglycerol, also exhibited species-specific patterns. In particular, S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus differed in their regulatory modes of fatty acid desaturation in CL. The acyl chain composition of CL in S. pastorianus was biased toward the characteristics of S. eubayanus. Our findings show that S. pastorianus integrates parental lipid regulatory systems in a lipid class-specific manner, combining S. cerevisiae-like regulation of storage lipids with S. eubayanus-like control of mitochondrial membrane lipids.
Takahashi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.