A one-carbon chemicals conversion strategy to produce precursor of biofuels with Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Utilization of one-carbon chemicals such as CO2, formate, and methanol by microorganisms can enable the sustainable production of fuels and chemicals. However, the low conversion efficiency of these chemicals by microorganisms is a major challenge. To address this, we designed a one-carbon strategy that can utilize CO2 and its derivative formate. Here, a platform yeast strain with improved formate utilization and NAD(P)H production was constructed and evaluated for its ability to produce free fatty acids (FFAs). Based on C-13-marked analysis, the one-carbon assimilation efficiency of the platform strain reached 11.24%. Through continuous optimization, under conditions of glucose feeding the formate utilization rate of the final strain reached 0.48 g/L/h, with the final titer of FFAs reached 10.1 g/L, which represented improvements of 21.8 times and 33.7 times, respectively. As such, the produced FFAs can be easily transformed into biodiesel by combining them with downstream technologies in future research.