Time and again, cell factories are proving to be not only a useful, but often an essential part of a wide range of industries. Their applications range from medicine and pharmaceuticals, to green energy and the manufacture of many other high value-added products. In the vast majority of cases, the strains found in nature are not sufficient in producing the desired product on their own, so the most important step in the construction of cell factories is to use precise, reliable and scalable methods to edit the genome of the selected producer organism. One such organism is the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which, due to its susceptibility to genome editing, represents a useful model organism and producer at an industrial level. In the construction of cell factories, it is often desirable to introduce a large number of changes to the genome at the same time, where large-scale genome editing methods are particularly useful. CRISPR/Cas-based methods are currently the first choice in such cases, but still do not allow for an unlimited breadth and depth when it comes to more complex and comprehensive genome editing. Taking a step further and looking at the construction of cell factories from the point of view of creating, rather than just editing an existing genome, we have so far been confronted with only a few successful examples of complete de novo synthesis of smaller genomes, and consequently more problems than solutions when it comes to the use of this technology for industrial purposes. Accordingly, the best choice for the production of high quality and economical cell factories at present is to combine de novo DNA synthesis and large-scale genome editing methods.
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