A trait syndrome ties cell morphology to glycolysis across the yeast subphylum

Traits that co-vary across species can provide fundamental insights into the trade-offs and constraints that govern their evolution. In a recent article in Current Biology, Li et al.1 reported that glucose uptake rates (GUR) are inversely correlated with the cell surface area-to-volume (SA:V) ratio across 11 yeast species. Here we substantially expand this analysis to 282 species to test whether the GUR-SA:V correlation generalizes across the ancient Saccharomycotina yeast subphylum and to determine the contribution of shared evolutionary history to the co-variation of these two traits. Using regression models that account for co-variation due to phylogeny, we found that extracellular acidification rates (ECAR, which we used as a proxy for GUR) had a significant correlation with SA:V across Saccharomycotina. In contrast to Li et al.1, our increased sample sizes provided statistical power to reveal additional significant correlations of ECAR with genome sizes and growth rates. Our findings dramatically extend and expand those of Li et al.1 and suggest that a trait syndrome governs several metabolic, genomic, and morphological traits across yeasts.