Rhodosporidium toruloides is a very promising oleaginous yeast for biodiesel production. It naturally accumulates large quantity of lipid as triacylglycerides, with fatty acid composition of mainly sixteen or eighteen carbon fatty acid. After transesterification, the fatty acid esters can be processed as diesel molecule. R. toruloides consumes variety of carbon sources such as glucose, xylose, sucrose, glycerol and etc, thus it can utilizes cellulosic feedstock. The bottleneck of research in R. toruloides is the lack of genetic tools, which constrained researchers only into its wild types. Here we have developed genetic tools and employed Stephanopoulos’s push and pull strategy which drives carbon flux into the preferred lipid synthesis pathway, and achieved improved lipid production and sugar utilization rate. Two genes in lipid synthesis (acetyl-coA carboxylase and diacylglycerol acyltransferase) were over-expressed under the strong GAPDH and ACL promoters in Rhodosporidium toruloides IFO0880 strain by Agrobacterium tumefaciens mediated transformation. In shake flask we achieved lipid content of 72% (lipid /dry cell weight), 13.6g/L lipid and the yield is 19.4% g lipid / g glucose. Compared to wild type, lipid yield increased 111%.

Increased lipid production via genetically engineered oleaginous yeast Rhodosporidium toruloides

249th National Meeting (2015)

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