Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeast or brewer’s yeast) is a popular microbial host in industrial biotechnology. Most synthetic biology tools to tune pathway expression focus on controlling transcription, whereas post‐transcriptional regulation is often overlooked. In this review, we discuss regulatory elements found in the 5′ untranslated region (UTR) and their influence on protein synthesis. Next to a set of design rules on how to engineer a 5′ UTR, the reader is also referred to currently available models that allow gene expression to be tuned predictably using different 5′ UTRs.
