Abstract
Among non-conventional yeasts of industrial interest, the dimorphic oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica 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 Yarrowia lipolytica 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 Yarrowia lipolytica 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 Yarrowia lipolytica 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 Yarrowia lipolytica and of other yeasts from the Yarrowia clade.
Highlights
A major challenge for our societies is to replace polluting technologies, based on fossil fuels, with clean ones, based on renewable resources
The JMY1212 high-throughput expression platform was notably applied to engineering Candida antarctica lipase B (CalB), a widely used enzyme in industrial biocatalysis, for which it allowed the construction of large libraries of CalB mutants and the screening of new variants with a higher catalytic efficiency [190]
There are some differences in the regulation between countries, especially concerning the release of GMOs, the most important ones being between the USA and European countries: the American policy is not giving as much attention to the process as other countries and takes into account a concept of substantial equivalence, when the European policy is more severe and holds to the precautionary principle [321]
Summary
A major challenge for our societies is to replace polluting technologies, based on fossil fuels, with clean ones, based on renewable resources. White biotechnology applications of this yeast include notably single cell oil production, whole cell bioconversion and upgrading of industrial wastes This history of use will be briefly resumed, but the present publication intends to put a new emphasis on the choice of available Yarrowia lipolytica strains and the natural biodiversity of this species. The range of ecosystems from which Y. lipolytica strains has been isolated has broadened to encompass very diverse habitats, from marine waters, salt marshes and soils (especially oil-polluted ones) to a variety of consumable products (including fruits, vegetables or seafood) and even the excreta of insects or vertebrates that consume them [1,3,4,5,6,7] This species appears to exhibit a rather ubiquitous distribution, in the natural world as well as in man-made extreme environments. This yeast is known to be able to adsorb metallic atoms and has been proposed for bioremediation of wastes containing heavy metals such as Cr, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn and Cd [9]
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