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Isoprenoid Diphosphate(IPP) is an important metabolites which is precursor in lot of secondary metabolites like Dolichol diphosphate, ubiquinone, prenylated proteins and carotenoid (not synthesized in s cerevisiae).
What is the average concentration of IPP present in yeast per gm ?
Although this information doesn't provide a direct answer to your question, I hope that it sets the scene for what is achievable in metabolic engineering from IPP. It should also provide a jumping off point for further literature research.
This is a fairly recent review of metabolic engineering of relevant pathways in various microbial systems, including Saccaharmoyes:
Ajikumar PK et al. (2008) Terpenoids: Opportunities for Biosynthesis of Natural Product Drugs Using Engineered Microorganisms. Molecular Pharmaceutics 5:167–190
The review refers to:
Ro, D. et al. (2006) Production of the antimalarial drug precursor artemisinic acid in engineered yeast. Nature 440, 940–943.
In this work, the introduction of a pathway-specific gene led to the production of 4.4 mg L-1 of product. This was increased to 153 mg L-1 by several manipulations including:
Increasing flux through the pathway by expressing a modified HMG CoA reductase
Decreasing flux into sterol synthesis by downregulation of the ERG9 gene combined with expression of a dominant negative allele of the transcription factor Upc2.
UPDATE
After posting my answer I found this paper:
Huang, B. et al. (2011) Metabolite target analysis of isoprenoid pathway in Saccharomyces cerevisiae in response to genetic modification by GC-SIM-MS coupled with chemometrics. Metabolomics 7:134–146
The paper includes a detailed discussion of methodologies, which I won't go into here.
Although there are no measurements of IPP, in Table 7 they present this result: geranyl pyrophosphate 32 ng ml-1 in a 48 h culture, A600 ~ 2.3. ERG9 disruption increased this to 56 ng ml-1
As far as I can tell these values are presented as ng ml-1 original culture. Using 1 U of OD600 corresponds to 0.41 g of dry cells liter−1 taken from here I calculate a value for GPP of 34 µg g-1 dry weight in the wild-type strain.
