Engineering Saccharomyces cerevisiae for Fungal Natural Product Production

Abstract Fungi are prolific producers of structurally diverse and bioactive natural products. The past decade has seen impressive growth in our understanding of the biosynthesis of these important molecules and engineering Saccharomyces cerevisiae for their heterologous production has been key to this growth in understanding. This article aims to summarize the use of S. cerevisiae for the study of fungal natural products. It begins with a survey of the current set of genetic tools available for the refactoring of fungal pathways for expression in S. cerevisiae, followed by a comprehensive review of fungal biosynthetic pathways that have been successfully expressed using these tools and finishes with a discussion of how these tools and the insights gained from these studies have been used for the engineering and discovery of novel natural products.