Advance in enhancing production of microbial lipids

Abstract:

Microbial lipid is the novel and promising oil resource for biodiesel production, whereas its production is difficult to meet industrial demand because of the low lipid productivity at the nitrogen-limited condition or inefficient conversion of cheap biomass into lipid. In the last decade, as the development of fermentation engineering, bioinformatics and molecular technologies, many strategies were used to modify the metabolic pathway for lipid accumulation and build up an excellent lipid-producing strain. In this paper, three potential strategies for enhancing the lipid productivity of oleaginous microorganism was reviewed, which includes the biochemical engineering (BE) approach, the genetic engineering (GE) approach, and the transcription factor engineering (TFE) approach. A comprehensive strategy based on the genomic information, the inverse metabolic engineering and the modular pathway engineering (MOPE) was described for rational construction of an industrial oleaginous strain.