Combination of cell disruption technologies for lipid recovery from dry and wet biomass of Yarrowia lipolytica and using green solvents

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the efficiency of bead milling combined or not with high-pressure homogenization on the cell disruption and lipid recovery from Yarrowia lipolytica oleaginous yeast. First, a simulation study involving the use of the Hansen solubility parameters’ approach was performed in order to identify, among 41 conventional and “green” solvents, the most promising ones that are able to replace n-hexane for lipid recovery from Y. lipolytica biomass. The results obtained showed that the pre-treatment involving both high-pressure homogenization and bead milling applied sequentially was more performant than that involving bead milling alone. In addition, bead-milling parameters were optimized showing an optimal bead size of 4.9 mm and a processing time of 30 s. Among the tested solvents, isoamyl acetate was selected as the most appropriate “green” solvent, maximizing the lipid extraction, compared to n-hexane. Despite the better performance of the dry route compared to the wet one, promising results were obtained towards 1) minimizing the energy consumed and 2) replacing n-hexane by “green” solvents for lipid recovery from Y. lipolytica yeast.