New Trends in Yeast Metabolic Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

To mitigate the effects of climate change, environmental pollution, population growth, and the sharp decline in agricultural land, the development of microbial cell factories has emerged as a commercially attractive hotspot for highly efficiently producing different chemicals due to the green, cost-competitive and sustainable advantages. Yeast, as a unicellular eukaryote, has long been exploited for industrial and biotechnological applications and is extensively chosen as the starting platform for valuable metabolite biosynthesis and production in the emerging field of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. Nowadays, with the help of state-of-the-art synthetic and systems biology technologies, yeast cells are widely used to solve a variety of societal challenges in the environment, energy and health. Therefore, the Journal of Fungi has decided to open a Special Issue on “New Trends in Yeast Metabolic Engineering”.

This Special Issue is primarily intended to collect research articles and reviews. We particularly welcome articles on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Engineering yeast cell factories for the production of native and non-native metabolites and chemicals, including but not limited to natural products, industrial enzymes, artificial foods, biofuels, biomaterials, biopolymers, biosurfactants, bioemulsifiers, biopigments, food ingredients, agrochemicals, nutraceuticals, and pharmaceuticals;
• Bioconversion of agricultural, food processing and forestry wastes into value-added products using yeast systems;
• Development of yeasts for therapeutic application and advanced drug discovery platforms;
• Metabolic rewiring of yeasts for enhanced conversion of one-carbon (C1) compounds into high-value chemicals;
• Exploring physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms underlying stress responses in yeasts, and improving cellular robustness and fitness of chassis cells in fungal biotechnology and pathogenesis;
• Innovative tools and strategies for designing and optimizing cell factories in model yeasts and non-conventional yeasts, including but not limited to biosensors, genome editing, pathway reconstruction, dynamic regulation, enzyme engineering, directed evolution and high-throughput screening;
• Construction and application of genome-scale metabolic models or development of novel machine-learning approaches to devise rational design of yeast cell factories, investigate metabolic basis for human disease and fill the gaps of fundamental studies on metabolism.

Prof. Dr. Aiqun Yu
Dr. Jiwei Mao
Dr. Ning Xu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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