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).