Abstract
Production of fatty acid-derived biofuels and chemicals have garnered attention in recent years owing to their potential to replace petroleum and plant oil-derived products. Through the metabolic engineering of the fatty acid metabolism pathway, advanced fuels and chemicals such as free fatty acid, triacylglycerol, biodiesel, fatty alcohols, alkanes/alkene, R-3-hydroxybutyric acid, polyhydroxyalkanoates and flavonoids have been produced. The robustness, high tolerance to organic solvent, good reputation in industrial fermentations and excellent availability of genetic tools make the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae a suitable cell factory for fatty acid-derived biofuels and chemicals production. This review will describe the successful metabolic engineering strategies employed to produce the fatty acid-derived bio-products in S. cerevisiae, including the enhancement of precursors and co-factors supply, promotion of the enzyme expression and activity, elimination of competing pathways, and the improvement of strain tolerance.
Highlights
Arising concerns over the energy and environment problems from petroleum industry, have stimulated interest in producing biofuels and chemicals from a renewable source
Several genetic tools have been developed in these oleaginous yeasts [11,12,13], high level gene expression and genetic parts modification tools are still lacking in them, which limit the use of them in biofuel production. They are promising hosts, and the study of oleaginous yeasts greatly assist the improvement of the fatty acid accumulation in S. cerevisiae, for example ATP dependent citrate lyase (ACL) and malic enzyme from oleaginous yeast have been widely used in biofuel production in S. cerevisiae [14,15]
The modification involved deletion of two of the main fatty acyl-coenzyme A (CoA) synthetase FAA1 and FAA4 to interrupt the reactivation of free fatty acids (FFA); deletion of fatty acyl-CoA oxidase POX1 to prevent fatty acid degradation; expression of a truncated E. coli thioesterase ‘tesA to increase FFA production from fatty acyl-CoA; expression of ATP: citrate lyase (MmACL) from Mus musculus, malic enzyme (RtME) from R. toruloides, endogenous malate dehydrogenase with removed peroxisomal signal (‘Mdh3) and citrate transporter Ctp1 to increase the supply of the precursor cytosolic acetyl-CoA; expression of a R.toruloides fatty acid synthase (FAS) (RtFAS) to enhanced fatty acid synthesis; and replacement of the native promoter of ACC1 with TEF1 promoter to moderately enhance the expression of the wild-type ACC1
Summary
Arising concerns over the energy and environment problems from petroleum industry, have stimulated interest in producing biofuels and chemicals from a renewable source. Several genetic tools have been developed in these oleaginous yeasts [11,12,13], high level gene expression and genetic parts modification tools are still lacking in them, which limit the use of them in biofuel production. They are promising hosts, and the study of oleaginous yeasts greatly assist the improvement of the fatty acid accumulation in S. cerevisiae, for example ATP dependent citrate lyase (ACL) and malic enzyme from oleaginous yeast have been widely used in biofuel production in S. cerevisiae [14,15]. Some progress reached in oleaginous yeast will be briefly summarized
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