Tool engineering for synthetic microbial consortia for metabolic engineering

The global demand for petroleum-based chemicals leads to an increase in their costs when petroleum amounts are declining. Building up a bio-based economy is the goal of metabolic engineering, which is making use of the tools of synthetic biology. Using synthetic microbial consortia instead of clonal populations is a promising new trend. Therefore novel methods and tools need to be developed to successfully engineer microbial consortia for metabolic engineering. Here we present engineered yeast strains that produce precursors to enable yeast as a production platform for PKS synthesis as an example for metabolic engineering.