The baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is generally classified as a non-xylose-utilizing organism. We found that S. cerevisiae can grow on D-xylose when only the endogenous genes GRE3 (YHR104w), coding for a nonspecific aldose reductase, and XYL2 (YLR070c, ScXYL2), coding for a xylitol dehydrogenase (XDH), are overexpressed under endogenous promoters. In nontransformed S. cerevisiae strains, XDH activity was significantly higher in the presence of xylose, but xylose reductase (XR) activity was not affected by the choice of carbon source. The expression of SOR1, encoding a sorbitol dehydrogenase, was elevated in the presence of xylose as were the genes encoding transketolase and transaldolase. An S. cerevisiae strain carrying the XR and XDH enzymes from the xylose-utilizing yeast Pichia stipitis grew more quickly and accumulated less xylitol than did the strain overexpressing the endogenous enzymes. Overexpression of the GRE3 and ScXYL2 genes in the S. cerevisiae CEN.PK2 strain resulted in a growth rate of 0.01 g of cell dry mass liter ؊1 h ؊1 and a xylitol yield of 55% when xylose was the main carbon source.The pentose sugar xylose is a major constituent of lignocellulose. Saccharomyces cerevisiae cannot use xylose, instead converting it primarily to xylitol with only a small fraction going into biomass or ethanol (44,45). Recombinant xylose-metabolizing S. cerevisiae strains contain genes from the xylose-utilizing yeast Pichia stipitis coding enzymes for the first two steps in xylose conversion (23,38,46). However, the potential of S. cerevisiae's own enzymes, if they are overexpressed, has not been evaluated.In xylose-utilizing fungi, xylose reductase (XR) reduces xylose to xylitol, which is oxidized to xylulose by xylitol dehydrogenase (XDH). Xylulose is subsequently phosphorylated to xylulose 5-phosphate by xylulokinase and metabolized through the pentose phosphate pathway. S. cerevisiae cannot utilize xylose but can grow on xylulose (15, 43). Thus, the inability of S. cerevisiae to utilize xylose was attributed to its inability to convert xylose to xylulose (15), even though low XR and XDH activities are known in S. cerevisiae (4). A nonspecific aldose reductase, converting xylose to xylitol, was purified and characterized from S. cerevisiae (24); however, the genes coding for the putative XR and XDH enzymes remained unknown. The third enzyme in the xylose pathway, xylulokinase, is encoded by XKS1, a gene that has been cloned from, and probably is functional in, S. cerevisiae (19). Moderate increases in xylulokinase activity are beneficial in recombinant xylose-metabolizing S. cerevisiae strains (9,18,20,21,40).Based on the S. cerevisiae genome sequence (14), the Nterminal amino acid sequence of the previously purified aldoketo reductase corresponds to the open reading frame YHR104w (GRE3), which has 72% amino acid similarity to the XR enzyme of P. stipitis. This enzyme can reduce a wide variety of ketose substrates and requires a NADPH cofactor (24). The XR of P. stipitis can use either NADH or NADPH i...