Engineering yeast as cellular factory

Abstract

Yeast is used as an attractive host for metabolic engineering. It is widely used in industries for the production of enzymes, fine chemicals, alcoholic beverages, baker's yeast, pharmaceutical products, biofuels, recombinant proteins, etc. Yeast can be grown easily as it requires simple growth factors such as carbon, vitamins, and salts which makes it economic for large-scale production. Among different types of yeast like Pichia pastoris, Hansenula polymorpha, Yarrowia lipolytica, Kluyveromyces lactis, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, S. cerevisiae is most commonly used. Yeast can be genetically modified to produce chemicals (glycerol, propanediol, organic acids, etc.) and fatty acid derivatives (fatty acid ester, fatty alkanes, and fatty alcohols). Yeast engineering for the production of biofuel has made the production of biofuel affordable and eco-friendly. Yeast has the ability to perform posttranslational modification and, therefore, is widely employed for producing human recombinant proteins. Generally modifications of enzyme activity are employed in yeast engineering to obtain desired product. Yeast engineering can be achieved by either introducing a new pathway in yeast or by altering the native pathway. In this chapter we have presented general considerations along with different strategies developed for the synthesis of various products using engineered yeast.