UC Irvine

The conversion of renewable biomass to industrial chemicals of interest through microbial synthesis represents a clean sustainable alternative to the finite supply of dirty fossil fuels that modern society is heavily dependent on. In particular, one class of biological molecules with industrial potential are lipids. Lipids and their precursors are suitable for conversion into a diverse array of industrial chemicals such as polymers, biofuels, and antibiotics. Furthermore, a subset of microbes, known as oleaginous yeast, are capable of accumulating high levels of intracellular lipids. However, the paucity of background knowledge and molecular tools of oleaginous yeast impedes the widespread adoption of these organisms by the biorenewable chemical industry. To address this shortcoming, we apply both familiar molecular cloning techniques along with innovative genomic technologies to greatly expand the molecular and genomic toolkit of the oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. We publish the most complete genome assembly of Y. lipolytica and utilized a transposon mutagenesis approach to query the genome and assign essentiality classifications to every annotated gene. We then utilize these tools to engineer a novel microbial platform for the synthesis of pogostone, a valuable antibiotic, from renewable glucose. This work not only features the development of a pipeline detailing the biorenewable production of a specific value-added chemical, but it also broadly advances the field of study pertaining to the oleaginous yeast Y. lipolytica.