Engineering oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica for violacein production: extraction, quantitative measurement and culture optimization

Violacein is a naturally occurring anticancer therapeutic with deep purple color. Yeast fermentation represents an alternative approach to efficiently manufacturing violacein from inexpensive feedstocks. In this work, we optimized the extraction protocol to improve violacein recovery ratio and purity from yeast culture, including the variations of organic solvents, the choice of mechanical shear stress, incubation time and the use of cell wall-degrading enzymes. We also established the quantitative correlation between HPLC and microplate reader method. We demonstrated that both HPLC and microplate reader are technically equivalent to measure violacein from yeast culture. Furthermore, we optimized the yeast cultivation conditions, including carbon/nitrogen ratio and pH conditions. Our results indicated that ethyl acetate is the best extraction solvent with glass beads grinding the cell pellets, the maximum violacein and deoxyviolacein production was 70.04 mg/L and 5.28 mg/L in shake flasks, respectively. Violacein purity reaches 86.92% at C/N ratio of 60, with addition of 10 g/L CaCO3 to control the media pH. Taken together, the development of efficient extraction protocol, quantitative correlation between HPLC and microplate reader, and the optimization of culture conditions set a new stage for engineering violacein production in Y. lipolytica. This information should be valuable for us to build a renewable and scalable violacein production platform from the novel host oleaginous yeast species.