A quick isolation method for mutants with high lipid yield in oleaginous yeast

摘要

A novel method has been developed to easily isolate the mutants with high lipid yield after irradiating oleaginous yeast cells with carbon ions of energy of 80 MeV/u. Pre-selection of the mutants after ion irradiation was performed with culture medium in which the concentration of cerulenin, a potent inhibitor of fatty acid synthetase, was at 8.96 μmol/l. Afterwards, lipid concentration in the fermentation broth of the pre-selected colonies was estimated by the sulfo-phospho-vanillin reaction instead of the conventional methanol–chloroform extraction. Two mutants with high lipid yield have been successfully selected out by the combined method. This easy and simple method is much less time-consuming but very efficient in the mutant isolation, and it has demonstrated great potential on mutation breeding in oleaginous microorganism.