A history of genome editing in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Genome editing is a form of highly precise genetic engineering which produces alterations to an organism's genome as small as a single base pair with no incidental or auxiliary modifications; this technique is crucial to the field of synthetic biology, which requires such precision in the installation of novel genetic circuits into host genomes. While a new methodology for most organisms, genome editing capabilities have been used in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae for decades. In this review, I will present a brief history of genome editing in S. cerevisiae, discuss the current gold standard method of Cas9-mediated genome editing, and speculate on future directions of the field.