For thousands of years, yeast has been a household name for the production of beer, bread and wine. However, with cheaper and faster engineering now available, the rise of genetically modified yeasts in commercial processes have given rise to yeast cell factories, which are able to produce a range of other important materials such as biofuels, isoprenoids, aromatics and recombinant proteins. These engineered yeasts have become an increasingly important commercial workhorse for modern society.

To showcase the current developments in this emerging field from key leaders and researchers, we are delighted to announce a new Thematic Issue on Yeast Cell Factories from FEMS Yeast Research. This Thematic Issue is guest edited by Irina Borodina and Zongbao Kent Zhao.

What’s yeast got to do with jet fuel, perfume, and antibodies? A lot, actually. Engineered yeast cells can produce all these and much more in a fermentation using renewable feedstocks… We hope that scientists from both academy and industry will enjoy reading these mini-reviews and will find them useful and inspiring.

Irina Borodina and Zongbao Kent Zhao, Guest Editors, FEMS Yeast Research

Explore the range of MiniReviews from leaders in the field and discover recent advances in metabolic engineering and the synthetic biology of yeast.