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Enhancement of free fatty acid production in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by control of fatty acyl-CoA metabolism

  • Applied genetics and molecular biotechnology
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Abstract

Production of biofuels derived from microbial fatty acids has attracted great attention in recent years owing to their potential to replace petroleum-derived fuels. To be cost competitive with current petroleum fuel, flux toward the direct precursor fatty acids needs to be enhanced to approach high yields. Herein, fatty acyl-CoA metabolism in Saccharomyces cerevisiae was engineered to accumulate more free fatty acids (FFA). For this purpose, firstly, haploid S. cerevisiae double deletion strain △faa1△faa4 was constructed, in which the genes FAA1 and FAA4 encoding two acyl-CoA synthetases were deleted. Then the truncated version of acyl-CoA thioesterase ACOT5 (Acot5s) encoding Mus musculus peroxisomal acyl-CoA thioesterase 5 was expressed in the cytoplasm of the strain △faa1△faa4. The resulting strain △faa1△faa4 [Acot5s] accumulated more extracellular FFA with higher unsaturated fatty acid (UFA) ratio as compared to the wild-type strain and double deletion strain △faa1△faa4. The extracellular total fatty acids (TFA) in the strain △faa1△faa4 [Acot5s] increased to 6.43-fold as compared to the wild-type strain during the stationary phase. UFA accounted for 42 % of TFA in the strain △faa1△faa4 [Acot5s], while no UFA was detected in the wild-type strain. In addition, the expression of Acot5s in △faa1△faa4 restored the growth, which indicates that FFA may not be the reason for growth inhibition in the strain △faa1△faa4. RT-PCR results demonstrated that the de-repression of fatty acid synthesis genes led to the increase of extracellular fatty acids. The study presented here showed that through control of the acyl-CoA metabolism by deleting acyl-CoA synthetase and expressing thioesterase, more FFA could be produced in S. cerevisiae, demonstrating great potential for exploitation in the platform of microbial fatty acid-derived biofuels.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. J. H. Hegemann for kindly providing the plasmids for gene deletion. This research is supported by a Competitive Research Programme (CRP) grant from the National Research Foundation of Singapore.

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  1. School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 62 Nanyang Drive, 637459, Singapore, Singapore

    Liwei Chen, Jianhua Zhang, Jaslyn Lee & Wei Ning Chen

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  1. Liwei Chen
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Correspondence to Wei Ning Chen.

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Chen, L., Zhang, J., Lee, J. et al. Enhancement of free fatty acid production in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by control of fatty acyl-CoA metabolism. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 98, 6739–6750 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-014-5758-8

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