Exploring fatty alcohol-producing capability of Yarrowia lipolytica.

Guokun Wang,Shulin Chen,Rishikesh Ghogare,Xiaochao Xiong,Pengdong Wang,Yonghong Meng

doi:10.1186/s13068-016-0512-3

Abstract

BackgroundFatty alcohols are important oleochemicals widely used in detergents, surfactants and personal care products. Bio-synthesized fatty alcohol provides a promising alternative to traditional fatty alcohol industry. Harnessing oleaginous microorganisms for fatty alcohol production may offer a new strategy to achieve a commercially viable yield that currently still seems to be a remote target.ResultsIn this study, we introduced functional fatty acyl-CoA reductase (FAR), TaFAR1 to direct the conversion from fatty acyl-CoA to fatty alcohol in Yarrowia lipolytica (Y. lipolytica), an oleaginous non-conventional yeast showing great lipid-producing capability. Tri-module optimizations including eliminating fatty alcohol degradation pathway, enhancing TaFAR1 expression, and increasing fatty acyl-CoA supply were furtherly conducted, resulting in 63-fold increase in intracellular fatty alcohol-producing capability compared to the starting strain. Thus, this work demonstrated successful construction of first generation of Y. lipolytica fatty alcohol-producing cell factory. Through the study of effect of environmental nutrition on fatty alcohol production, up to 636.89 mg/L intracellular hexadecanol (high fatty alcohol-retaining capability) and 53.32 mg/L extracellular hexadecanol were produced by this cell factory through batch fermentation, which was comparable to the highest production of Saccharomyces cerevisiae under the similar condition.ConclusionThis work preliminarily explored fatty alcohol-producing capability through mobilization of FAR and fatty acid metabolism, maximizing the intracellular fatty alcohol-producing capability, suggesting that Y. lipolytica cell factory potentially offers a promising platform for fatty alcohol production.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13068-016-0512-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Highlights

Fatty alcohols are important oleochemicals widely used in detergents, surfactants and personal care products
Large amount of hexadecanol was located extracellular of S. cerevisiae strain (Fig. 2b), whereas no hexadecanol was detected in extracellular environment of Y. lipolytica strain, demonstrating high capability of retaining fatty alcohol of Y. lipolytica cell
First generation fatty alcohol-producing Y. lipolytica cell factory was constructed by connecting fatty alcohol with fatty acyl-CoA, mobilization of fatty acid metabolism, and culturing optimization

Summary

Introduction

Fatty alcohols are important oleochemicals widely used in detergents, surfactants and personal care products. Fatty alcohols represented a range of aliphatic alcohols with chain lengths ranging from C8 to C32 [1] Due to their aliphatic character, fatty alcohols find many applications as ingredient of detergents, surfactants, and personal care products [2]. Fatty alcohols are mainly produced from petrochemical sources (synthetic fatty alcohols), or derived from renewable resources such as plant or animal-original fats, oils, and waxes (natural fatty alcohols) [3]. Problems derived from these conventional feedstock such as decreasing petroleum supply and competition with food, limited development of Escherichia coli (E. coli) as a prokaryotic model organism, exhibited good capability of producing fatty alcohol. E. coli strain carrying FAR-encoding gene from Marinobacter aquaeolei VT8 and the modified genes for acyl-CoA synthase

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Discussion

Conclusion