Biomanufacture of diverse chemicals in yeast

Both bioactive natural products and petroleum-derived chemicals face resource scarcity and accessibility challenges, limiting their sustainable use. Global crises, including energy crisis, land scarcity, climate change, and urgent health demands, intensify the need for sustainable supply chains and innovative production methods. Biomanufacture grounded in synthetic biology technologies could offer a potentially transformative solution by enabling conversion of cheap carbon source into higher-value products, aligning with the blueprint for sustainable development of human society. Microorganisms can be engineered as cell factories to convert carbon sources like glucose and glycerol, or even one-carbon sources such as CO2 and methanol, into high-value products, such as sugars, starch, and valuable natural products. As an industrial workhorse microorganism, yeast has recently achieved transformative breakthroughs in biotransformation research, providing confidence for future development of biomanufacturing technologies to produce diverse chemicals. These advances are mainly demonstrated in three aspects: (1) biotransformation of CO2 into simple chemicals in yeast, (2) biotransformation of methanol into short pathway chemicals in yeast, and (3) biotransformation of glucose into highly complex natural products in yeast.