Isolation of a new strain that displays capacity to achieve high lipid content from xylose.

In this work, we isolated and selected oleaginous yeasts from rock field soils from two National Parks in Brazil ( and ) with the potential to accumulate oil from xylose, the main pentose sugar found in lignocellulosic biomass. From the 126 isolates, two were selected based on their lipid contents. They were taxonomically identified as (UFV-1 and UFV-2). Of the two, UFV-1 was selected as the best lipid producer Under unoptimized conditions, lipid production by UFV-1 was higher in glucose than in xylose. To improve its lipid production from xylose, we applied response surface methodology (RSM) with a face-centered central composite design (CCF). We evaluated the effects of agitation rate, initial cell biomass (OD), carbon/nitrogen ratio (/ ratio) and pH on lipid production. UFV-1 recorded the highest lipid content, 63.5% (w/w) of the cell dry mass, under the following conditions: / ratio = 100:1, pH value = 7.0, initial OD = 0.8 and agitation = 300 rpm. Under these optimized conditions, biomass, lipid titer and volumetric lipid productivity were 9.31 g/L, 5.90 g/L and 0.082 g/L.h, respectively. Additionally, we determined the fatty acid composition of UFV-1 as follows: C14:0 (0.5%), C16:0 (28.4-29.4%), C16:1 (0.2%), C18:0 (9.5-11%), C18:1 (58.6-60.5%), and C20:0 (0.7-0.8%). Based on this composition, the predicted properties of biodiesel showed that UFV-1 oil is suitable for use as feedstock in biodiesel production.