New biotechnological applications for Ashbya gossypii: Challenges and perspectives

ABSTRACT

The filamentous fungus Ashbya gossypii has long been considered a paradigm of the White Biotechnology in what concerns riboflavin production. Its industrial relevance led to the development of a significant molecular and in silico modeling toolbox for its manipulation. This, together with the increasing knowledge of its genome and metabolism has helped designing effective metabolic engineering strategies for optimizing riboflavin production, but also for developing new A. gossypii strains for novel biotechnological applications, such as production of recombinant proteins, single cell oils (SCOs), and flavour compounds. With the recent availability of its genome-scale metabolic model, the exploration of the full biotechnological potential of A. gossypii is now in the spotlight. Here, we will discuss some of the challenges that these emerging A. gossypii applications still need to overcome to become economically attractive and will present future perspectives for these and other possible biotechnological applications for A. gossypii.

KEYWORDS:

• Ashbya gossypii
• biolipids
• flavour compounds
• inosine
• recombinant proteins
• single cell oils
• vitamins

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Funding

This work was support by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal, through the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit and COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006684) (Post-Doc fellowship to T. Q. Aguiar), BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004) funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020 - Programa Operacional Regional do Norte, and PhD grant PD/BD/113812/2015 to R. Silva.