Iron-enriched Bread: Promoting Heme Production in Saccharomyces cerevisiae using HemQ

Several hundred million people around the world are facing iron deficiency problems, which can lead to a range of health problems, such as anemia and weakened immunity. Due to global climate change nowadays, the occurrence of extreme weather, the greenhouse effect, and the lack of nutrients in crops, particularly the lack of iron, have become more and more intense. In the case of limited nutrients in crop food, how to maximize the available iron content in food and absorption of iron by the human body has become an important problem. Considering that hemoglobin is the bodys main conduit for iron absorption, we thought that by improving the synthesis of hemoglobin by yeast, we could allow enhanced iron intake. In the research, we introduced a bacterial hemQ gene into Saccharomyces cerevisiae and localized its expressed protein in mitochondria to enable a new metabolic pathway for promoting heme production.