On the way to produce triacylglycerides enriched in poly-unsaturated fatty acids in Escherichia coli

Abstract

The increasingly high production cost of PUFA makes necessary the development of new sources of those treasured molecules. With that purpose, several attempts to obtain value-added single cell oil in industrial bioreactors (i.e. through microalgae culturing) have been made (Sijtsma et al., 2004). Free fatty acids in bacteria are normally either metabolized or employed as a building part of the plasma membrane. However, they can be accumulated as part of TAGs in organisms capable of storing these neutral lipids. This accumulation also facilitates its extraction. The TAGs produced in any cell are constituted by the fatty acids occurring in its cytoplasm. Therefore, a change in the fatty acid pool in a WS/DGAT –encoding bacteria lead to the production of modified TAGs. Our objective is obtaining bacteria capable of producing and accumulating highly value-added TAGs by enriching its fatty acid pool in PUFA.