Candida boidinii

A yeast expression platform is a strain of yeast used to produce large amounts of proteins, sugars or other compounds for research or industrial uses. While yeast are often more resource-intensive to maintain than bacteria, certain products can only be produced by eukaryotic cells like yeast, necessitating use of a yeast expression platform. Yeasts differ in productivity and with respect to their capabilities to secrete, process and modify proteins. As such, different types of yeast (i.e. different expression platforms) are better suited for different research and industrial applications.

Since the onset of genetic engineering, a number of microorganisms have been developed for the production of biological products. These products are used in medicine and industry to create pharmaceuticals like hepatitis B vaccines or insulin. Common platforms for the development of medicine and other products include the bacterium E. coli, and several yeasts and mammalian cells (including, notably, Chinese hamster ovary cells). In general a microorganism used as an expression platform has to meet several criteria: it should be able grow rapidly in large containers, produce proteins in an efficient way (i.e. with minimal resource input), be safe and, in case of pharmaceuticals, it should produce and modify the products to be as ready for human consumption as possible.

Yeasts are common hosts for the production of proteins from recombinant DNA. They offer relatively easy genetic manipulation and rapid growth to high cell densities on inexpensive media. As eukaryotes, they are able to perform protein modifications like glycosylation which are common in eukaryotic cells, but relatively rare in bacteria. Due to this, yeast can produce complex proteins that are identical or very similar to native products from plants or mammals. The first yeast expression platform was based on the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. However since then a variety of yeast expression platforms have been studied and are widely used for various applications based on their different characteristics and capabilities. For instance some of them grow on a wide range of carbon sources and are not restricted to glucose, as it is the case with baker’s yeast. Several of them are also applied to genetic engineering and to the production of foreign proteins.

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