Engineering biology of yeast for the production of high-value aromatic compounds

Aromatics have a wide range of applications in food, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Nowadays, the production of aromatics is mainly from petroleum-derived chemical process or extraction from plant resources. Microbial-derived aromatics provides an alternative renewable approach, which could be engineered, easily scalable and standardised (Peng et al. 2023 ACS Synth Biol 12(6): 1739-1749). However, the development of aromatics-producing microbial cell factories is limited by the time-consuming design-build-test-learn (DBTL) cycle, and the often complex and very long aromatics synthesis pathways. This project aims to develop advanced yeast microbial cell factories with improved production capabilities using cutting-edge synthetic biology tools and novel metabolic engineering strategies. These include advanced cloning methods such as Golden Gate and USER cloning, as well as genome editing tools like CRISPR-Cas9, genome-scale metabolic modeling (GEMs), and precision fermentation. This project will revolutionize the supply chain for aromatics by developing sustainable biosolutions that reduce dependency on non-renewable resources.