Roles and applications of autophagy in guarding against environmental stress and DNA damage in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Saccharomyces cerevisiae (S. cerevisiae), a famous chassis cell factory, often faces various environmental stress conditions like extreme temperature, osmolarity, and nutrient starvation during the fermentation process. Additionally, chromosomal replication and genome editing-assisted metabolic engineering may cause DNA damage to S. cerevisiae. S. cerevisiae has evolved multiple elaborate mechanisms to fend against these adverse conditions. One of these "self-repair" mechanisms is autophagy, a ubiquitous "self-eating" mechanism that transports intracellular components to the lysosome/vacuole for degradation. Here, we reviewed the current state of our knowledge about the role and application of autophagy regulation in S. cerevisiae in response to environmental stress and genome damage, which may provide new strategies for developing robust industrial yeast and accelerating genome engineering.