Yarrowia lipolytica: Safety assessment of an oleaginous yeast with a great industrial potential

Abstract

Yarrowia lipolytica has been developed as a production host for a large variety of biotechnological applications. Efficacy and safety studies have demonstrated the safe use of Yarrowia-derived products containing significant proportions of Yarrowia biomass (as for DuPont's eicosapentaenoic acid-rich oil) or with the yeast itself as the final product (as for British Petroleum's single-cell protein product). The natural occurrence of the species in food, particularly cheese, other dairy products and meat, is a further argument supporting its safety. The species causes rare opportunistic infections in severely immunocompromised or otherwise seriously ill people with other underlying diseases or conditions. The infections can be treated effectively by the use of regular antifungal drugs, and in some cases even disappeared spontaneously. Based on our assessment, we conclude that Y. lipolytica is a ''safe-to-use'' organism.

Cocoa-Butter-Equivalent Production from <i>Yarrowia lipolytica</i> by Optimization of Fermentation Technology

“…With the decrease of the culture temperature, the degree of saturation of fatty acid was generally decreased, the culture temperature influenced the fatty acid composition of Y. lipolytica. At low temperatures, the desaturase stability was increased and other enzymes were not increased in stability, led to the different formation of lipid profile and low temperatures led to the decrease of cellular activity and metabolism, it is not conducive to the synthesis of lipids (Groenewald et al, 2014). So with the change of incubation temperature, it maybe increase the SFA content of lipids produced and then synthesized intracellular lipids similar to cocoa butter and could be considered to be used as cocoa butter equivalent.…”

“…Yarrowia lipolytica can stores more than 90% of TAGs in its cells and it has the potential to be used as cell factory for the production of oils, the yeast also could be used as raw material to apply in large-scale fermentation of food industry with its safety record (Beopoulos et al, 2009;Groenewald et al, 2014). In this study, we studied the effects of carbon source, nitrogen source, temperature, sterculic acid methyl ester, cobalt on cell growth and lipid accumulation of Yarrowia lipolytica, in order to obtain the optimal control point for single-cell lipid production with fatty acid profile similar to cocoa butter and this study could provide theoretical basis for using the yeast as raw material to commercialized production of cocoa butter.…”

Conversion of Mutton Fat to Cocoa Butter Equivalent by Increasing the Unsaturated Fatty Acids at the Sn-2 Position of Triacylglycerol Through Fermentation by <i>Yarrowia Lipolytica</i>

“…lipolyticastores mostly TAGs (>90%, w/w) and has considerable potential to be used as a cell factory for oil production applied in food industry on the basis of commercial-scale fermentation performance and an excellent safety record (Groenewald et al, 2014). In the present work, the low quality feedstock, mutton fat, was considered as intact triglycerides substrates to produce SCO and the effects of nitrogen and substrate fat, incubation time, dissolved oxygen and addition of methyl stearate on Y. lipolytica cell growth and lipid synthesis were studied.…”

Combinatorial Engineering of Yarrowia lipolytica as a Promising Cell Biorefinery Platform for the de novo Production of Multi-Purpose Long Chain Dicarboxylic Acids

“…The pathogenic yeast, C. tropicalis, has been commonly engineered for whole cell biotransformation of aliphatic feedstock to LCDCAs [14,25]. However, Y. lipolytica has safe status, and has been categorized as a GRAS microorganism by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) [56,88]. This status, as well as its probiotic properties [117], can pave the way toward the biosynthesis of LCDCAs that meet the safety requirements of the food and pharmaceutical industries.…”