Yeast Engineering

Yeasts are common chassis organisms for manufacturing biologics, i.e., small molecules, proteins, and RNAs, in industrial biotechnology or precision fermentation. To breed the producer yeasts (or called yeast cell factories), synthetic biology and metabolic engineering have been used, through which heterologous synthetic genes are introduced into yeast through genetic engineering methods. This can easily deliver prototype purposes, but yeast cells must deliver the ideal key production indexes (yield/titre/rate) for feasibly industry-scale production.

This project focuses on designing and engineering intracellular genetic and metabolic networks to break through the natural barriers for scalable profitable production.

Research projects

  • Understanding and re-engineering network control in yeast
  • Yeast synthetic biology tools for precise ON/OFF switching
  • Yeast genome evolution tools to maintain stability for industrial production

Program lead