In the long run, which organism will be better for new genomes: Yeast, or E coli?
Usually, the answer would be E coli. But S cerevisiae hold a key that E coli cannot counter: compartmentalization. Orthogonal systems are extremely easy in S cerevisiae! In fact, it has one built in: the mitochondria. The mitochondria hold everything needed to be its own orthogonal factory. Translation, transcription, replication, and even location are all orthogonal from the host genome.
However, it is very very difficult to actually work with the mitochondria of any cell, but in yeast there are at least protocols ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2771616/ ). There are, infact, only 8 sites of the 3 restriction enzyme sites (BtgZI, BsmBI, and BsaI) in the entire yeast mitochondrial chromosome!
Therefore, when it comes time for library preparation of different DNAs (essential genes for E coli, first) refactoring of the yeast mitochondria will be in parallel.
Hopefully in the future, more efficient ways to engineer the yeast mitochondria will be available. For this specific purpose we would like the KG brick the tRNA synthases and the replication proteins that work with the mitochondria for further simplified engineering.
Idea 1 for Yeast 3.0:
Relocate the mitochondrial proteins onto a new chromosome