A Highly Characterized Yeast Toolkit for Modular, Multipart Assembly

Saccharomyces
cerevisiae is an increasingly attractive
host for synthetic biology
because of its long history in industrial fermentations. However,
until recently, most synthetic biology systems have focused on bacteria.
While there is a wealth of resources and literature about the biology
of yeast, it can be daunting to navigate and extract the tools needed
for engineering applications. Here we present a versatile engineering
platform for yeast, which contains both a rapid, modular assembly
method and a basic set of characterized parts. This platform provides
a framework in which to create new designs, as well as data on promoters,
terminators, degradation tags, and copy number to inform those designs.
Additionally, we describe genome-editing tools for making modifications
directly to the yeast chromosomes, which we find preferable to plasmids
due to reduced variability in expression. With this toolkit, we strive
to simplify the process of engineering yeast by standardizing the
physical manipulations and suggesting best practices that together
will enable more straightforward translation of materials and data
from one group to another. Additionally, by relieving researchers
of the burden of technical details, they can focus on higher-level
aspects of experimental design.