Metabolic engineering of oleaginous yeasts for fatty alcohol production Wei Wang, Hui Wei, Eric Knoshaug, Stefanie Van Wychen, Qi Xu, Michael E. Himmel, Min Zhang National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO 80401 *
[email protected] Abstract Production of fatty alcohol in Lipomyces Ls[FAR] 900 70.0 To develop pathways for advanced biological upgrading of sugars to C16 C18 800 hydrocarbons, we are seeking biological approaches to produce high 60.0 C18:1 C20 carbon efficiency intermediates amenable to separations and catalytic 700 50.0 upgrading to hydrocarbon fuels. In this study, we successfully 600 demonstrated fatty alcohols production by the oleaginous yeasts, Yarrowia 500 40.0 400 lipolytica and Lipomyces starkeyi, by expressing the bacterial fatty acyl- 30.0 CoA reductase (FAR) gene, resulting in the production of 167 and 770 mg/L 300 Fatty alcohol(%) 20.0 200 of fatty alcohols in shaking flasks, respectively. Moreover, we find much (mg/L) production alcohol Fatty higher extracellular distribution of fatty alcohols produced by FAR- 100 10.0 expressing L. starkeyi compared to Y. lipolytica. In both yeasts, long chain 0 0.0 C t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 t7 t8 t9 t10 t11 t12 t13 t14 t15 t16 t17 t18 t19 t20 length saturated fatty alcohols, i.e., hexadecanol and octadecanol were t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 t7 t8 t9 t10 t11 t12 t13 t14 t15 t16 t17 t18 t19 t20 predominant, accounting for more than 85% of total fatty alcohols 70 transformants were confirmed to produce fatty alcohols with varied levels, among which produced. Our work demonstrates that, in addition to Y.