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The problem

The current state of industrial biotechnology means that the vast majority biorefineries relies on edible substrates such as corn, wheat or sugar canes. This has sparked sparked the food vs. fuel debate, leading to the fundamental question: “Should we use our edible crops to feed the growing human population, or use it to provide sustainable chemicals to the industrialised world?”. A better question might be: “Why are we not doing both?”. The limiting factor of current processes, is a lack of molecular tools that has limited us to rely on a small number of organisms with narrow substrate ranges. Even though efforts has been made to expand the substrate range of many conventional cell factories, such as Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the task has proven difficult and real impact has soon to come as a result of these experiments

The solution

The development of new technologies such as CRISPR and Next-generation sequencing has dramatically reduced the effort required to genetically modify non-model organisms, and is effectively breaking down the barrier between model and non-model organism. Therefore we though: “Why force a model organisms to grow on non-conventional substrates, when we can start of with an organism that already grows on a broad range of substrates?”. See our proposed solution by scrolling down.

Project description

Our idea
By basing biorefineries on an organism with a broad substrate range we will be able to utilize industrial waste-streams as substrate for biorefineries, and leave edible feedstocks for the growing human population.
Introducing Yarrowia Lipolytica In contrast to today’s model organisms, Y. lipolytica has been shown to exhibit excellent growth on a long range of substrates, ranging from reduced sugars, organic acids and even lipids. Due to this broad substrate range, Y. lipolytica is ideal for bio-refineries based on non-conventional substrates. What substrates? Studies have shown Y. lipolytica could support biorefineries based on a long range of both crude and complex substrates. Several studies even suggests Y. lipolytica could support utilising substrates such as wastewater from oils mills, the remains from fish and meat production, leftover glycerol from bio-diesel production and the mixed sugars resulting from hydrolysates of lignocellulosic biomass. Why haven’t anyone done this already?! Despite the great potential of Y. lipolytica to support a biorefinery based on waste streams, realising this with a large scale plant has yet to become a reality. This is mainly due to the frugal toolbox associated with Y. lipolytica, which makes this organism a less desirable as cell factory compared to conventional cell factories such as Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Aspergillus niger. Yeastillisation Our project, Yeastillisation, aims to develop a genetic and bioinformatic toolbox, thereby paving the way for the use of Y. lipolytica as a novel cell factory for future biorefineries.

Team:DTU-Denmark/test1

The problem

The solution

Project description