Metabolic Engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for Industrial Biotechnology

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an important and popular host for production of value-added molecules such as pharmaceutical ingredients, therapeutic proteins, chemicals, biofuels and enzymes. S. cerevisiae, the baker’s yeast, is the most used yeast model as there is an abundance of knowledge on its genetics, physiology and biochemistry, and also it has numerous applications in genetic engineering and fermentation technologies. There has been an increasing interest in developing and improving yeast strains for industrial biotechnology. Metabolic engineering is a tool to develop industrial strains by manipulating yeast metabolism to enhance the production of value-added molecules. This chapter reviews the metabolic engineering strategies for developing industrial yeast strains for biotechnological applications and highlights recent advances in this field such as the use of CRISPR/Cas9.