HISTORY OF GENOME EDITING IN YEAST

For thousands of years humans have used the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae for production of bread and alcohol, however only for the last 30-40 years our understanding of the yeast biology has dramatically increased enabling us to modify its genome. Although S. cerevisiae has been the main focus of many research groups, other non-conventional yeasts have also been studied and exploited for biotechnological purposes. Our experiments and knowledge have evolved from recombination, to high-throughput PCR based transformations, to highly accurate CRISPR methods, in order to alter yeast traits for either research of industrial purposes. Since the release of the genome sequence of S. cerevisiae in 1996, the precise and targeted genome editing has increased significantly.
In this ‘Budding topic’ we discuss the significant developments of genome editing in yeast, mainly focusing on Cre-loxP mediated recombination, delitto perfetto and CRISPR/Cas.