Sustainable production of oleochemicals requires establishment of cell factory platform strains. The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an attractive cell factory as new strains can be rapidly implemented into existing infrastructures such as bioethanol production plants. Here we show high-level production of free fatty acids (FFAs) in a yeast cell factory, and the production of alkanes and fatty alcohols from its descendants. The engineered strain produces up to 10.4 g l−1 of FFAs, which is the highest reported titre to date. Furthermore, through screening of specific pathway enzymes, endogenous alcohol dehydrogenases and aldehyde reductases, we reconstruct efficient pathways for conversion of fatty acids to alkanes (0.8 mg l−1) and fatty alcohols (1.5 g l−1), to our knowledge the highest titres reported in S. cerevisiae. This should facilitate the construction of yeast cell factories for production of fatty acids derived products and even aldehyde-derived chemicals of high value.

The widely used pESC vector series (Stratagene, La Jolla, CA, USA) with the bidirectional GAL1 /GAL10 promoter provides the possibility of simultaneously expressing two different genes from a single vector in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This system can be induced by galactose and is repressed by glucose. Since S. cerevisiae prefers glucose as a carbon source, and since its growth rate is higher in glucose than in galactose-containing media, we compared and evaluated seven different promoters expressed during growth on glucose (pTEF1, pADH1, pTPI1, pHXT7, pTDH3, pPGK1 and pPYK1 ) with two strong galactose-induced promoters (pGAL1 and pGAL10 ), using lacZ as a reporter gene and measuring LacZ activity in batch and continuous cultivation. TEF1 and PGK1 promoters showed the most constant activity pattern at different glucose concentrations. Based on these results, we designed and constructed two new expression vectors which contain the two constitutive promoters, TEF1 and PGK1, in opposite orientation to each other. These new vectors retain all the features from the pESC-URA plasmid except that gene expression is mediated by constitutive promoters.

The construction of mitotically stable yeast strains for heterologous gene or pathway expression often requires chromosomal integration. However, transcription levels vary between different chromosome regions. We therefore characterized 20 different integration sites of the Sacchromyces cerevisiae genome by inserting lacZ as a reporter gene under the control of two different promoters and determining expression levels through enzyme activity measurement. An up to 8.7-fold difference was detected between the sites conferring lowest and highest expression, respectively. This opens the opportunity for modulating gene expression levels while retaining promoter and culture conditions.

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