Genome sequencing and assembly of Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain IMX2600

Strains belonging to the CEN.PK family were created as part of a multidisciplinary project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation in 1993-1994 (Entian and Kotter, 2007). This lineage was chosen as a model system for physiology and metabolic engineering research based on its ability to efficiently grow under aerobic and anaerobic conditions in various cultivation setups, to efficiently mate and sporulate and to retain high spore viability, to show an excellent genetic amenability, and lack of aggregation (van Dijken et al., 2000). With the advent of CRISPR editing technology (DiCarlo et al., 2013; Jinek et al., 2013) and the increasing complexity of genetic engineering strategies that can involve iteration of transformation rounds, integrating a chromosomal copy of Spycas9 can contribute to accelerate strain engineering (Mans et al., 2015). To this end, the Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain IMX2600 (MATa MAL2-8c SUC2 can1delta::Spycas9-natNT2) was developed from the prototrophic strain CEN.PK113-7D (MATa MAL2-8c SUC2) by co-integrating the Spcas9 gene under regulatory control of the ScTEF1 promoter and ScCYC1 terminator (DiCarlo et al., 2013), along with a natNT2 selection cassette (de Kok et al., 2011), at the CAN1 locus (Wronska et al., 2021). IMX2600 and related strains have been used in constructing several microbial cell factories (Bouwknegt et al., 2021; Perli et al., 2021; Postma et al., 2022). To ensure accurate sequencing analysis during strain construction, a reference genome sequence of this platform strain is essential.