4  SYNTHETIC YEAST FUTURES
This section presents a summary
of emerging trends and how these rapidly-expanding bioinformational and
biophysical engineering technologies might enable development in a
variety of newer concepts, including synthetic yeast genomes, synthetic
model systems (FigureĀ 3), and, in the long run, the creation of a
synthetic cell with which new understandings of biological complexities
could be achieved (Dixon et al., 2020; Dixon and Pretorius, 2020). These
new frontiers include the construction of fully synthetic yeast genomes
(Pretorius and Boeke, 2018); synthetic minimal genomes (Xu et al.,
2023); supernumerary neochromosomes (Kutyna et al., 2022; Schindler and
Walker et al., 2023); synthetic metagenomes (Belda et al., 2021) ;
synthetic yeast communities (Walker and Pretorius 2022); synthetic
specialists yeasts (Dixon et al., 2021a,b; Lee et al., 2016; Llorente et
al., 2022; ); and new-to-nature synthetic cells (Frischmon et al.,
2021). Box 1 provides definitions for the rapidly expanding synthetic
yeast research landscape.
These conceptual model genomes, systems and cells are all inspired by
the complexity inherent to natural biological systems, yet implemented
through rational design undertaken by synthetic biologists. Most are at
varying stages of development with plenty of technological pitfalls to
be overcome. Naturally, these futuristic concepts will be subject to
review and improvement as new data and technologies become available.
Although
these revolutionary ideas may very well not progress beyond the
boundaries of a laboratory, their implementation will lead to better and
more practical developments with which researchers could uncover some of
the hitherto mysterious aspects of yeast resilience, fermentation
performance, flavour biosynthesis, and ecological interactions (van Wyk
et al., 2018).