“…In particular, strains of the CEN.PK family have become a popular platform in both fundamental research and industrial applications as they offer a good compromise between physiological properties (e.g., the growth characteristics in shake-flask cultures) and genetic properties (e.g., transformation efficiency) [7]. CEN.PK strains have been applied in numerous metabolic and evolutionary engineering studies, such as for the production of lactate and pyruvate [8, 9], isoprenoids [10, 11], C 4 -dicarboxylic acids [12], ornithine [13], n-butanol [14], and 3-hydroxypropionic acid [15], and for the fermentation of pentose sugars [16–18]. Although some of these processes could profit from utilizing glycerol as a carbon source due to its high reducing power, wild-type strains of the CEN.PK family cannot utilize glycerol at all in synthetic medium, particularly when complex medium supplements such as yeast extract or peptone are omitted [19, 20].…”