Systems biology and synthetic engineering of probiotic yeasts.

Systems biology and multi-omics can integrate comparative genomics, stress transcriptomics, cell-surface proteins, and metabolomics to generate testable hypotheses for strain-specific probiotic yeast traits, especially in Saccharomyces boulardii.

• Why it matters: Strain-specific mechanisms of yeast probiotics are incompletely understood, limiting how well strain differences can be linked to functional outputs and probiotic effects.
• What they did: The review synthesizes comparative genomics/pangenomics, gastrointestinal stress transcriptomic responses, cell-surface proteins, metabolomic outputs, and genome-scale metabolic modeling using flux balance analysis and 13C metabolic flux analysis.
• The result: Conserved and strain-specific variation, differential stress responses, acetate production, pathogen binding, and host-cell effects can be examined together, though causal links between most variants and probiotic effects remain unresolved.