The need for alternative energy sources that combine environmental friendliness with biodegradability, low toxicity, renewability, and less dependence on petroleum products has never been greater. One such energy source is referred to as biodiesel. This can be produced from vegetable oils, animal fats, microalgal oils, waste products of vegetable oil refinery or animal rendering, and used frying oils. Chemically, they are known as monoalkyl esters of fatty acids. The conventional method for producing biodiesel involves acid and base catalysts to form fatty acid alkyl esters. Downstream processing costs and environmental problems associated with biodiesel production and byproducts recovery have led to the search for alternative production methods and alternative substrates. Enzymatic reactions involving lipases can be an excellent alternative to produce biodiesel through a process commonly referred to alcoholysis, a form of transesterification reaction, or through an interesterification (ester interchange) reaction. Protein engineering can be useful in improving the catalytic efficiency of lipases as biocatalysts for biodiesel production. The use of recombinant DNA technology to produce large quantities of lipases, and the use of immobilized lipases and immobilized whole cells, may lower the overall cost, while presenting less downstream processing problems, to biodiesel production. In addition, the enzymatic approach is environmentally friendly, considered a "green reaction", and needs to be explored for industrial production of biodiesel.

An important industrial enzyme, Candida rugosa lipase (CRL) possesses several different isoforms encoded by the lip gene family (lip1-lip7), in which the recombinant LIP1 is the major form of the CRL multigene family. Previously, 19 of the nonuniversal serine codons (CTG) of the lip1 gene hav been successfully converted into universal serine codons (TCT) by overlap extension PCR-based multiple-site-directed mutagenesis to express an active recombinant LIP1 in the yeast Pichia pastoris. To improve the expression efficiency of recombinant LIP1 in P. pastoris, a regional synthetic gene fragment of lip1 near the 5' end of a transcript has been constructed to match P. pastoris-preferred codon usage for simple scale-up fermentation. The present results show that the production level (152 mg/L) of coLIP1 (codon-optimized LIP1) has an overall improvement of 4.6-fold relative to that (33 mg/L) of non-codon-optimized LIP1 with only half the cultivation time of P. pastoris. This finding demonstrates that the regional codon optimization the lip1 gene fragment at the 5' end can greatly increase the expression level of recombinant LIP1 in the P. pastoris system. More distinct biochemical properties of the purified recombinant LIP1 for further industrial applications are also determined and discussed in detail.