Yeast as a Platform Cell Factory in Future Biorefineries

Besides its classical application in the production of bread, beer and wine, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a widely used cell factory for large scale production of biofuels such as ethanol, for production of fine chemicals such as resveratrol, and for production of pharmaceutical proteins such as human insulin and vaccines. In connection with the development of biorefineries for sustainable production of fuels and chemicals, there is much interest to use yeast as a cell factory due to its general acceptance in the industry, its robustness towards contaminations, its high alcohol tolerance, and its low pH tolerance. Further advantages of using yeast are that a large number of molecular biology techniques are available for this organism, there is a large experimental data base available and there is an excellent research infrastructure. Compared with bacteria yeast, however, suffer from lower metabolic rates and the metabolism is more complex due to compartmentalization.

In this lecture will be given an introduction to how the metabolism of yeast can be engineered for production of novel fuels and chemicals. This involves the use of systems biology tools, where advanced genome-scale metabolic models are used for identification of targets for metabolic engineering. It further involves the use of synthetic biology for the integration of completely new pathways with the objective to short-cut regulatory circuits controlling flux. Several examples on the use of these different tools will be given, demonstrating how yeast can be engineered to produce a range of different products and hence can serve as a platform cell factory in modern biorefineries.