Glycerol Production by the Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and its Relevance to Wine: A Review

By K. T. Scanes, S. Hohrnann, B. Prior. 2017

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Glycerol is a sugar alcohol produced as a by-product of the ethanol fermentation process by Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In wines, levels between 1 and 15 gll are frequently encountered and the higher levels are thought to contribute to the smoothness and viscosity of wine. Glycerol and ethanol levels are inversely related, which may add an additional favourable attribute to wine.  The metabolic pathways involved in glycerol synthesis, accumulation and utilisation by yeast are now better understood since a number of the genes involved in glycerol metabolism have been cloned, sequenced and their functions established. These fundamental studies now permit the glycerol levels produced by yeast to be raised by either the specific control of the culture conditions or by the manipulation of the genetic and molecular properties of the yeast. In some instances, the level of glycerol produced under laboratory conditions has been significantly raised. However, a number of undesirable by-products also accumulate during the fermentation and an improved understanding of the glycerol metabolic flux is required before wines with a consistently elevated glycerol concentration can be produced.

Subfields: Food Science, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d17ae4a719a8e93aa63b51bd9866244e8dffbf69

How researchers see this paper

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In Food Science

1. N. Jolly
2. I. S. Pretorius
3. O. Augustyn
4. F. Calderón
5. F. Bauer
6. S. Benito
7. A. Benito
8. Cristian Varela

In Molecular Biology

1. N. Jolly
2. F. Bauer
3. F. Calderón
4. O. Augustyn
5. I. S. Pretorius
6. M. Ciani
7. F. Comitini
8. G. Fleet

Citations in the corpus

• The Influence of Non-Saccharomyces Species on Wine Fermentation Quality Parameters (2019, background): “cerevisiae synthesizes glycerol from glucose through glycolysis, where dihydroxyacetone phosphate is reduced to glycerol-3-phosphate and later oxidized to glycerol [58,59].”
• Yeast Stress Response and Fermentation Efficiency: How to Survive the Making of Wine - A Review (2019, background): “…cells respond to such a hyperosmotic shock through a number of mechanisms, including the modifica tion of the cell wall and the cytoskeleton (Slaninova et al., 2000), and the synthesis of a compatible compound, glycerol, to reestab lish an osmotic equilibrium (Hohmann, 1997; Scanes et al., 1998).”
• The role and use of non-saccharomyces yeasts in wine production (2017, background): “Glycerol, after ethanol, is the next major yeast metabolite produced during wine fermentation and is important in yeast metabolism for regulating the redox potential in the cell (Scanes et al., 1998; Prior et al., 2000).”