A New Environmentally Friendly Algal Oil with Enhanced Performance in Lubricants

摘要

Solazyme’s microbial oil technology represents a paradigm shift in the production oftriglyceride oils for use in the chemical and food industries. First, the manipulation ofoilseed traits in agriculture is a multi-year process. The time required to produce a newvegetable oil from product inception, through large scale field trials and seed production,whether utilizing traditional breeding, agricultural biotechnology or a combination of thetwo, can easily span 7-10 years. This new microbial oil process significantly reduces thetime horizon required to produce entirely new oils, generating multi-kilogram samples ina few months scaling to metric tons in less than a year, depending on the oil type.Second, the types of oils that can be produced using traditional oilseed crops can belimited due to constraints in the available germplasm, an inability to carry out robustgenetic engineering and cultivar improvement or the inherent biology of oilseeddevelopment. This new microbial technology, on the other hand, is comprised of ahighly facile genetic engineering toolkit that can precisely target gene insertion eventsresulting in exquisite temporal and spatial regulation of gene expression. Utilizing thesetools, oils can now be tailored to have dramatically altered chain length and saturationlevels relative to that seen in our base algal strain and this tailoring can be combined withan ability to control regiospecificity of fatty acid insertion on the glycerol backbone,resulting in the generation of oils with dramatically altered physical properties. Oncegenerated, such strains can be evolved quite rapidly using standard microbial strainimprovement methodologies. In addition, the biology of this oil production processseparates oil production from cell growth, allowing for the elaboration of oils that aresimply not possible in traditional oilseed crops as they would greatly impair oilseeddevelopment.Finally, traditional oilseed production relies on a months-long process whereby oildeposition occurs in the field and is limited by climatic, edaphic (soil) and geographicconstraints inherent to the specific oilseed crop being cultivated. Indeed, theselimitations can profoundly impact oil yields and quality. This technology dramaticallycompresses the time required for oil production, from months in the field to hours in highcell density fermentations. Likewise, because the process is fermentation based, it isessentially immune to factors associated with climate, soil or geography resulting in theproduction of oils with remarkably consistent profiles in geographic regions not