Oleaginous Yeast Serves as a β-carotene Cell Factory

β-carotene is used as a color additive or nutritional supplement for humans and animals, and is commercially produced by chemical synthesis or through Blakeslea trispora fermentation. Previous studies have focused on engineered Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae for heterologous β-carotene production.

Prof. YANG Sheng and his colleagues at Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Key Laboratory of Synthetic Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), develop a series of genome editing tools for Y. lipolytica (Shuliang Gao et al. Biotechnol. Lett. 2014; J. Ind. Microbiol. Biotechnol. 2016) with collaboration with other groups, and generate an efficient biosynthetic pathway using strong promoters and multiple gene copies for each of the 12 steps.

In their study, using fed-batch fermentation with an optimized medium, the engineered pathway could produce 4 g/L β-carotene, which is stored in lipid droplets within engineered Y. lipolytica cells. This work demonstrates that Y. lipolytica could be an industrially relevant platform for hydrophobic terpenoid production.

The study entitled “Iterative integration of multiple-copy pathway genes in Yarrowia lipolytica for heterologous β-carotene production” has been published online in Metabolic Engineering on April 13, 2017. This work was supported by Chinese Academy of Science and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.

Article Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ymben.2017.04.004

Schematic describing the metabolic engineering of Y. lipolytica for β-carotene production

CONTACT:
YANG Sheng, Ph.D.
Key Laboratory of Synthetic Biology
Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology
Chinese Academy of Sciences
300 Fenglin Road
Shanghai 200032
Phone: (86) 21-54924173
Fax: (86) 21-54924015
Email: syang@sibs.ac.cn