Metabolic engineering of oleaginous yeast in lipogenic phase enhances production of nervonic acid

Insufficient biosynthesis efficiency can be a major obstacle to engineer oleaginous yeasts to overproduce very long-chain fatty acids (VLCFAs) during the lipogenic phase. Taking nervonic acid (NA, C24:1) as an example, we overcame the bottleneck to overproduce NA in engineered Rhodosporidium toruloides by improving the biosynthesis of VLCFAs during the lipogenic phase. First, evaluating the catalytic preferences of three plant-derived ketoacyl-CoA synthases rationally guided reconstructing efficient NA biosynthetic pathway in R. toruloides. More importantly, a genome-wide transcriptional analysis endowed clues to strengthen the fatty acid elongation (FAE) module and identify/use lipogenic phase-activated promoter, collectively addressing the stagnation of NA accumulation during the lipogenic phase. The best-designed strain exhibited a high NA content (major component in total fatty acid [TFA], 46.3%) and produced a titer of 44.2 g/L in a 5 L bioreactor. The strategy developed here provides an engineering framework to establish the microbial process of producing valuable VLCFAs in oleaginous yeasts. To understand the underlying mechanism of the weakening productivity of the VLCFA biosynthesis during the lipogenic phase, we first conducted a genome-wide comparative transcriptomic analysis using Rhodosporidium toruloides strains grown at 48h and 120h, respectively.