Assessment of lipid synthesis from sugarcane biomass by adaptive strains of Rhodosporidium toruloides

Rhodosporidium toruloides is an unconventional yeast with a natural lipid pathway known to accumulate oil under suitable conditions, typically characterized by nutritional stress induced through the depletion of essential nutrients. The objective of this research was to evaluate microbial oil production by implementing an adaptation strategy in three strains of Rhodosporidium toruloides, all isolated from the Brazilian biome, to increase tolerance to degradation products resulting from pretreatment steps of sugarcane biomass. This is the first time these three strains have been tested for lipid accumulation and tolerance to biomass hydrolysate. The assays were performed to study the assimilation of glucose and xylose, as well as the performance of their mixture in synthetic medium. Subsequently, all non-adapted strains were tested using the previously obtained non-detoxified hemicellulosic hydrolysate. Due to their performance, a step of previous adaptation of the media was employed. Essentially, the strains were successive cultivated in increasing concentrations of hemicellulosic hydrolysate, incremented by 10