Metabolic reconstruction and flux analysis of industrial Pichia yeasts

Pichia yeasts have been recognized as important microbial cell factories in the biotechnological industry. Notably, the Pichia pastoris and Pichia stipitis species have attracted much research interest due to their unique cellular physiology and metabolic capability: P. pastoris has the ability to utilize methanol for cell growth and recombinant protein production, while P. stipitis is capable of assimilating xylose to produce ethanol under oxygen-limited conditions. To harness these characteristics for biotechnological applications, it is highly required to characterize their metabolic behavior. Recently, following the genome sequencing of these two Pichia species, genome-scale metabolic networks have been reconstructed to model the yeasts’ metabolism from a systems perspective. To date, there are three genome-scale models available for each of P. pastoris and P. stipitis. In this mini-review, we provide an overview of the models, discuss certain limitations of previous studies, and propose potential future works that can be conducted to better understand and engineer Pichia yeasts for industrial applications.