Combinatorial pathway assembly in yeast

Abstract

With the emergence of synthetic biology and the vast knowledge about individual biocatalytic reactions, the challenge nowadays is to implement whole natural or synthetic pathways into microorganisms. For this purpose balanced enzyme activities throughout the pathway need to be achieved in addition to simple functional gene expression to avoid bottlenecks and to obtain high titers of the desired product. As the optimization of pathways in a specific biological context is often hard to achieve by rational design, combinatorial approaches have been developed to address this issue. Here, current strategies and proof of concepts for combinatorial pathway assembly in yeasts are reviewed. By exploiting its ability to join multiple DNA fragments in a very efficient and easy manner, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae does not only constitute an attractive host for heterologous pathway expression, but also for assembling pathways by recombination in vivo.

Keywords

• heterologous pathway expression
• homologous recombination
• metabolic engineering
• <i>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</i>
• synthetic biology