Abstract: Yarrowia lipolytica is a widely used industrial microbial strain and is generally recognized as safe (GRAS). In recent years, with the rapid development of biosynthetic techniques and gene editing tools, the novel microbial chassis Y. lipolytica has already been successfully engineered to produce various high value-added industrial products including biochemical products, biofuels, flavorings, pharmaceutical products, industrial enzymes and pharmaceutical proteins, making it a promising candidate for application in the food, pharmaceutical and biochemical energy fields. The purpose of this article is to introduce the readers to the latest progress in the expression system and synthetic biological parts in Y. lipolytica and the application of gene editing tools on it. In addition, we summarize the recent applications of Y. lipolytica as a microbial cell factory for the biosynthesis of some representative industrial products. This article will hopefully provide some useful information for researchers to design, construct and optimize new biosynthetic pathways for high-level production of target products by engineered Y. lipolytica.

Key words: Yarrowia lipolytica; synthetic biology; gene editing; promoter; terminator; clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats