Bioengineering of Oleaginous Yeast Yarrowia lipolytica for Lycopene Production

Abstract

Oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica is capable of accumulating large amount of lipids. There is a growing interest to engineer this organism to produce lipid-derived compounds for a variety of applications. In addition, biosynthesis of value-added products such as carotenoid and its derivatives have been explored. In this chapter, we describe methods to integrate genes involved in lycopene biosynthesis in Yarrowia. Each bacterial gene involved in lycopene biosynthesis, crtE, crtB, and crtI, will be assembled with yeast promoters and terminators and subsequently transformed into Yarrowia through random integration. The engineered strain can produce lycopene under lipid accumulation conditions.

Production of Lycopene in the Non-Carotenoid-Producing Yeast Yarrowia lipolytica

“…The higher lycopene storage capacity of oleic acidgrown cultures is an advantage only when maximum capacity is reached by production. It seems that higher lycopene content can be achieved by growth-limiting conditions, as had been described by Ye et al (14).…”

“…This was also shown previously for S. cerevisiae (8). Recently it was described how Y. lipolytica can be engineered to produce lycopene (14). Unfortunately, the authors did not report what amounts of lycopene can be expected.…”

“…Lycopene is known to have antifungal activity against the human pathogen Candida albicans (6) and causes a stress response in S. cerevisiae (7). Carotenoid production was already achieved with the non-carotenoid-producing yeasts S. cerevisiae (8), Candida utilis (3,9,10), Pichia pastoris (11), and Y. lipolytica (12)(13)(14).…”

Metabolic engineering of Yarrowia lipolytica for industrial applications

“…Simultaneous over-expression of codon-optimized CrtE, CrtB, and CrtI in an EPA-producing strain accumulated lycopene to 2 mg/g DCW in flask assays [61,63]. When the codon-optimized CrtE, CrtB, CrtI, and HMG were over-expressed in a mutant ( pox1-pox6 and gut2), the engineered strain produced lycopene at 16 mg/g DCW in fed-batch cultures [64 ].…”

Yarrowia lipolytica as an Oleaginous Cell Factory Platform for Production of Fatty Acid-Based Biofuel and Bioproducts

“…However, its application as a safe food additive may require further long-term oral toxicity analysis. This yeast has also been engineered for lycopene production (Ye et al, 2012;Matthäus et al, 2014). In a recent study, disruption of POX1-6 and GUT2 genes were followed by the introduction of heterologous genes and upregulation of native genes to achieve a maximum lycopene yield of 16 mg/g DCW in a fed-batch system under oil accumulation conditions.…”