Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Exhibit Hall
Microbial oil can be an attractive feedstock for biodiesel production. Oleaginous microorganisms have significant advantages such as rapid growth and high oil production, compared to conventional oilseed crops. Several oleaginous yeast and fungal strains can accumulate high content of lipids in their cell biomass, but most of them cannot directly utilize cellulose due to the lack of capability to generate cellulase by these strains. A Fusarium strain was found out in the recent screening of endophytic fungal community inside oilseed crops and this strain can both generate cellulase and accumulate up to 56% of lipids in the cell biomass. This research focuses on studying the growth behavior of this strain and then developing different conversion technologies in directly utilizing lignocellulosic materials for microbial oil accumulation. The strain does not generate aflatoxin and can utilize different types of carbon sources, including glucose, xylose, manose, galactose, glycerol, lactose, sucrose, starch, xylan, and cellulose. This is the first report about Fusarium strains to be able to accumulate high amount of lipids and the strain is suitable to develop consolidated bioprocessing process for biofuel generation.