Overview of yeast environmental stress response pathways and the development of tolerant yeasts

Yeast is widely used for industrial production of various types of products, such as ethanol and enzymes. However, its fermentation efficiency is strongly reduced by harmful environmental stresses. Specifically, harmful environmental stresses damage important cellular components, such as cell wall, cell membrane, proteins, etc. Then, these damages cause cellular metabolic disorders or even death. In the past decades, there has been a portfolio of studies on the environmental stress tolerance of yeasts, which mainly aimed at cell damages caused by different environmental stresses, different ways to improve yeast environmental stress tolerance or a tolerance mechanism for certain environmental stress. However, a comprehensive overview of how yeasts respond to environmental stresses is lacking, and the correlation of tolerance mechanism between different environmental stresses is unclear. In this review, we summarized the general damages induced by most of environmental stresses, the existing major mechanisms of environmental stress tolerance from the perspective of key signalling pathways, and the common ways to improve the resistance to environmental stresses in yeast cells. The tolerance mechanisms of yeast cells to different environmental stresses are diverse, but sometimes they share the same signalling pathway. Cells use sensors on the cell surface to recognize environmental stresses and transmit signals to the nucleus to cause changes in gene expression. By summarizing the main signalling pathways, including MAPK pathway, cAMP/PKA pathway, YAP1/SKN7 pathway, it will provide a powerful reference for future efforts to promote yeast environmental stress tolerance and study yeast tolerance mechanisms.