Strain selection and improvement in the baker’s yeast industry have aimed to increase the speed of maltose fermentation in order to increase the leavening activity of industrial baking yeast. We identified two groups of baker’s strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae that can be distinguished by the mode of regulation of maltose utilization. One group (nonlagging strains), characterized by rapid maltose fermentation, had at least 12-fold more maltase and 130-fold-higher maltose permease activities than maltose-lagging strains in the absence of inducing sugar (maltose) and repressing sugar (glucose). Increasing the noninduced maltase activity of a lagging strain 13-fold led to an increase in CO2 production in unsugared dough. This increase in CO2 production also was seen when the maltose permease activity was increased 55-fold. Only when maltase and maltose permease activities were increased in concert was CO2 production by a lagging strain similar to that of a nonlagging strain. The noninduced activities of maltase and maltose permease constitute the largest determinant of whether a strain displays a nonlagging or a lagging phenotype and are dependent upon theMALx3 allele. Previous strategies for strain improvement have targeted glucose derepression of maltase and maltose permease expression. Our results suggest that increasing noninduced maltase and maltose permease levels is an important target for improved maltose metabolism in unsugared dough.

To utilise maltose as a carbon source Saccharomyces cerevisiae needs one or more functional MAL loci that contain the MALx1 gene encoding maltose permease, MALx2 encoding maltase, and MALx3 encoding a transcriptional activator. Maltose causes a rapid MALx3-dependent induction of MAL gene transcription, and glucose represses this activation via Mig1p. A MALx3 gene conveying high MAL gene expression in the absence of maltose in a malx3 laboratory mutant strain has been isolated from baker's yeast. The construction of hybrid genes between the isolated gene and a highly regulated MALx3 gene showed that constitutivity was the result of multiple amino-acid alterations throughout the structural gene. The combined effect of these amino-acid alterations was shown to be stronger than the sum of their individual effects on constitutivity. Analysis in glucose-repressed conditions confirmed that increased MALx3 transcript levels increased the glucose insensitivity of MAL gene expression but did not affect constitutivity. Analysis of four mutations between aa 343 and 375, lying within a proposed negative regulatory domain, showed that the single mutation of Leu343Phe increased the glucose insensitivity of MAL gene expression by 30-fold. These results demonstrate that not only Mig1p modulation of MALx3 expression, but also the MALx3 protein structure, is involved in the glucose-insensitive expression of the MAL genes.