Ethyl acetate is an industrially relevant ester that is currently produced exclusively through unsustainable processes. Many yeasts are able to produce ethyl acetate, but the main responsible enzyme has remained elusive, hampering the engineering of novel production strains. Here we describe the discovery of a new enzyme (Eat1) from the yeast Wickerhamomyces anomalus that resulted in high ethyl acetate production when expressed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Escherichia coli. Purified Eat1 showed alcohol acetyltransferase activity with ethanol and acetyl-CoA. Homologs of eat1 are responsible for most ethyl acetate synthesis in known ethyl acetate-producing yeasts, including S. cerevisiae, and are only distantly related to known alcohol acetyltransferases. Eat1 is therefore proposed to compose a novel alcohol acetyltransferase family within the alpha/beta hydrolase superfamily. The discovery of this novel enzyme family is a crucial step towards the development of biobased ethyl acetate production and will also help in selecting improved S. cerevisiae brewing strains.
During the past few years, several methods have been developed for the detection of specific nucleic acid sequences by in situ hybridization using non-radioactive labels such as fluorochromes, cytochemically detectable enzymes and electron-dense markers. These methods are preferable to autoradiography in terms of speed of performance and topological resolution. Their limited sensitivity, however, has so far restricted their use to the detection of repeated sequences. Here we report single gene detection with a procedure using 2-acetylaminofluorene (AAF)-modified probes, immunoperoxidase cytochemistry and reflection-contrast microscopy. We confirmed the autoradiographic data on the localization of the human thyroglobulin (Tg) gene to the distal end of the long arm of chromosome 8. A mixture of cosmid cHT2-derived subclones of the 3' part of the Tg gene, 22.3 kilobase pairs (kbp) in total, was used as a hybridization probe. This procedure can be used to map other unique sequences, if genomic clones are available from which clones with an appropriate amount of inserts can be isolated.
