Integration and Validation of the Genome-Scale Metabolic Models of <i>Pichia pastoris</i>: A Comprehensive Update of Protein Glycosylation Pathways, Lipid and Energy Metabolism

<div><p>Motivation</p><p>Genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) are tools that allow predicting a phenotype from a genotype under certain environmental conditions. GEMs have been developed in the last ten years for a broad range of organisms, and are used for multiple purposes such as discovering new properties of metabolic networks, predicting new targets for metabolic engineering, as well as optimizing the cultivation conditions for biochemicals or recombinant protein production. <i>Pichia pastoris</i> is one of the most widely used organisms for heterologous protein expression. There are different GEMs for this methylotrophic yeast of which the most relevant and complete in the published literature are iPP668, PpaMBEL1254 and iLC915. However, these three models differ regarding certain pathways, terminology for metabolites and reactions and annotations. Moreover, GEMs for some species are typically built based on the reconstructed models of related model organisms. In these cases, some organism-specific pathways could be missing or misrepresented.</p><p>Results</p><p>In order to provide an updated and more comprehensive GEM for <i>P</i>. <i>pastoris</i>, we have reconstructed and validated a consensus model integrating and merging all three existing models. In this step a comprehensive review and integration of the metabolic pathways included in each one of these three versions was performed. In addition, the resulting iMT1026 model includes a new description of some metabolic processes. Particularly new information described in recently published literature is included, mainly related to fatty acid and sphingolipid metabolism, glycosylation and cell energetics. Finally the reconstructed model was tested and validated, by comparing the results of the simulations with available empirical physiological datasets results obtained from a wide range of experimental conditions, such as different carbon sources, distinct oxygen availability conditions, as well as producing of two different recombinant proteins. In these simulations, the iMT1026 model has shown a better performance than the previous existing models.</p>