Recent advances on biological synthesis of lycopene by using industrial yeast

Lycopene has been widely applied in the food and medical fields due to having antioxidant, anticancer, and anti-inflammatory properties. Traditional lycopene production processes including natural extraction and chemical synthesis cannot meet the growing market demand and the pursuit for natural products of consumers. Microbial synthesis of lycopene has offered a promising alternative owing to its unique advantages. Industrial yeasts can produce lycopene by introducing heterologous synthetic pathways, which have become a reliable process to replace plants for lycopene production. In order to increase the lycopene production in industrial yeast, some strategies such as increasing the supply of precursors, looking for the optimal combination of lycopene synthesis genes, modularizing the enzymes in the metabolic pathway, increasing the content of cofactors, reducing product toxicity to cells, and optimizing fermentation methods make industrial yeast an effective strain for producing lycopene. This review mainly summarizes the research progress of lycopene produced by several industrial yeasts, analyzes the factors affecting the lycopene synthesis in the metabolic pathways, and summarizes and prospects the methods and strategies used to achieve high yields of lycopene in yeast to help with future research.