The use of yeast and other microorganisms for food production is probably the oldest application of microbial biotechnology. Yeast fermented food is still one of the main components of human nutrition and nowadays in depth knowledge of the physiology, genetics and metabolism of this eukaryotic microorganism allows the production of tailor-made products. A comprehensive view of the whole biological system is possible today thanks to the development of systems biology, whose tool box includes advanced experimental and computational methodologies.
In this chapter, we define the basic tools and aims of systems biology, in connection with the possibilities and challenges of a systems biology approach to the production of food and food ingredients using yeast. In the production of fermented food, the application and future perspectives of systems biology are described in relation to wine and beer production, where the main challenges are connected to the use of mixed yeast cultures and industrial yeast strains. Food ingredients are also discussed, including compounds that are or can be produced by yeast fermentation and then added to food following purification. The focus is turned to flavours and colouring whose production via yeast fermentation has great potential.
Nutraceuticals are a further class of food-related products, typically defined as food supplements with bioactive and beneficial properties for human health. Here we consider the production of yeast enriched with beneficial metabolites with antioxidant activity and present recent research on the improvement of existing yeast-based nutraceuticals.
The brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the most used yeast in food production and also the best characterized at physiological, metabolic and molecular levels and therefore most of the systems biology tools and models have been developed for this yeast. However, novel yeast-based production exploiting so-called non-conventional yeasts which have favourable properties has good potential: a few are discussed at the end of this chapter, underlying how systems biology tools can be valuable for implementation of novel cell factories for food ingredients.