New article published on glucolipid synthesis in S. bombicola!

Glucolipids (GLs) are glycolipid biosurfactants with promising properties, but up until today these interesting molecules could only be produced using an engineered Starmerella bombicola strain(∆ugtB1::URA3 G9) producing GLs instead of sophorolipids, albeit with a very low average productivity (0.01 g/L.h). In this study, we found that all glycolipid biosynthetic genes and enzymes were downregulated in the ∆ugtB1G9 strain in comparison to the wild type. Also a clear distortion of the entire metabolism of the ∆ugtB1G9 strain was revealed.  Because the parental strain of the former was a spontaneous ∆ura3 mutant potentially containing other ‘hidden’ mutations, a new GL production strain was generated based on a rationally engineered ∆ura3 mutant (PT36). Indeed, a 50 fold GL productivity increase (0.51 g/L.h) was obtained with the new ∆ugtB1::URA3 PT36 strain compared to the G9 based strain (0.01 g/l.h) in a 10 L bioreactor experiment, yielding 118 g/L GLs instead of 8.39 g/L.

You can read more about it right here!

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