The renaissance of yeasts as microbial factories in the modern age of biomanufacturing

Abstract

Yeasts are essential for many processes, including the production of some of our most beloved foods and beverages. Less is known to the public about the far‐reaching impacts of yeasts on other products such as biofuels, pharmaceuticals, and industrial products. By leveraging and combining newly discovered yeast genetic diversity with now affordable and efficient genetic engineering and synthetic biology tools, academic and industrial yeast labs have designed yeast cell factories for a wide range of novel applications such as the production of medicines, components of human breast milk, heme for meat substitutes, bioplastics, and other biomaterials. This review covers the newest technologies developed for yeast research including synthetic biology and their use in the engineering of yeast cell factories for emerging applications.

Development and applications of a CRISPR activation system for facile genetic overexpression in Candida albicans

“…These CRISPRa systems were applied to activate transcriptionally silent biosynthetic gene clusters in these filamentous fungi, with important applications for the discovery of novel bioactive molecules ( Roux et al 2020 ; Mózsik et al 2021 ). As many Candida species play important industrial roles in manufacturing metabolites for food and pharmaceutical industries, as well as remediating wastewater via hydrocarbon degradation ( Joo et al 2008 ; Gargouri et al 2015 ; Kieliszek et al 2017 ; Payen and Thompson 2019 ; García-Béjar et al 2020 ), species-specific adaptations to the CRISPRa tool presented here could produce optimized Candida strains for valuable biomanufacturing and bioremediation applications.…”

Development and applications of a CRISPR activation system for facile genetic overexpression in Candida albicans

“…2015; Kieliszek et al . 2017; Payen and Thompson 2019; García-Béjar et al . 2020), species-specific adaptations to the CRISPRa tool presented here could produce optimized Candida strains for valuable biomanufacturing and bioremediation applications.…”

“…These CRISPRa systems were applied to activate transcriptionally-silent biosynthetic gene clusters in these filamentous fungi, with important applications for the discovery of novel bioactive molecules (Roux et al 2020;Mózsik et al 2021). As many Candida species play important industrial roles in manufacturing metabolites for food and pharmaceutical industries, as well as remediating wastewater via hydrocarbon degradation (Joo et al 2008;Gargouri et al 2015;Kieliszek et al 2017;Payen and Thompson 2019;García-Béjar et al 2020), species-specific adaptations to the CRISPRa tool presented here could produce optimized Candida strains for valuable biomanufacturing and bioremediation applications.…”