Among non-conventional yeasts of industrial interest, the dimorphic oleaginous yeast appears as one of the most attractive for a large range of white biotechnology applications, from heterologous proteins secretion to cell factories process development. The past, present and potential applications of wild-type, traditionally improved or genetically modified strains will be resumed, together with the wide array of molecular tools now available to genetically engineer and metabolically remodel this yeast. The present review will also provide a detailed description of strains and highlight the natural biodiversity of this yeast, a subject little touched upon in most previous reviews. This work intends to fill this gap by retracing the genealogy of the main strains of industrial interest, by illustrating the search for new genetic backgrounds and by providing data about the main publicly available strains in yeast collections worldwide. At last, it will focus on exemplifying how advances in engineering tools can leverage a better biotechnological exploitation of the natural biodiversity of and of other yeasts from the clade.