Metabolic engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for the synthesis of valuable chemicals

Abstract

In the twenty first century, biotechnology offers great opportunities and solutions to climate change mitigation, energy and food security and resource efficiency. The use of metabolic engineering to modify microorganisms for producing industrially significant chemicals is developing and becoming a trend. As a famous, generally recognized as a safe (GRAS) model microorganism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae is widely used due to its excellent operational convenience and high fermentation efficiency. This review summarizes recent advancements in the field of using metabolic engineering strategies to construct engineered S. cerevisiae over the past ten years. Five different types of compounds are classified by their metabolites, and the modified metabolic pathways and strategies are summarized and discussed independently. This review may provide guidance for future metabolic engineering efforts toward such compounds and analogues. Additionally, the limitations of S. cerevisiae as a cell factory and its future trends are comprehensively discussed.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Saccharomyces cerevisiae
• metabolic engineering
• cell factory
• chemicals
• metabolic pathways
• metabolic strategies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the grants from the National Key R&D Program of China [2018YFA0901500] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 31771958].