Abstract
The oleaginous yeast, Yarrowia lipolytica, is becoming increasing popular for metabolic engineering applications. Advances in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering have allowed microorganisms such as Y. lipolytica to be tailored for specific chemical production. Significant progress has been made to understand the genetics of Y. lipolytica and towards developing novel genetic engineering tools, leading to accelerated metabolic engineering efforts for a variety of different products. In this review, we discuss recent advances in genetic engineering tools and metabolic engineering achievements specific to Y. lipolytica. Topics covered in this review include genetic manipulation and expression systems, lipid-based products, peroxisome-based products and alternative sugar utilization.
Highlights
The non-conventional oleaginous yeast, Yarrowia lipolytica, has been used in industry for the over 60 years
Advances to this protocol soon followed with a lithium acetate (LiAc) protocol adapted from Saccharomyces cerevisiae to obtain site-directed integrative transformation efficiencies of up to 1 × 104 transformants/g of linearized DNA [38]
This study demonstrated that lipid accumulation could be uncoupled from nitrogen starvation and established links between leucine-mediated signaling and lipogenesis
Summary
The non-conventional oleaginous yeast, Yarrowia lipolytica, has been used in industry for the over 60 years. The oleaginous property of Y. lipolytica allows this yeast to accumulate lipids greater than 20% of dry cell weight [1] This trait along with continued improvements in genetic engineering tools has led to increased interest in engineering this host for the production of lipid-based products. Episomal plasmid vectors, high expression synthetic promoters, and CRISPR-Cas genome editing has been developed for use in Y. lipolytica [5,6,7,8,9] Such advances in genetic engineering tools have accelerated metabolic engineering efforts in Y. lipolytica. Efficient transformation protocols in tandem with access to fully annotated and sequenced genomes of Y. lipolytica strains has greatly facilitated the development of genetic engineering tools over the past three decades [34,35,36] These genetic engineering tools include but are not limited to the creation of hybrid, carbon responsive, and inducible promoter systems alongside quick and efficient genome editing efforts (Figure 1)
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