Fig. 1

Overview of the approaches for xylose-based fatty alcohol production and improvement. a Scheme for the introduction of xylose utilization pathway to a fatty alcohol-producing S. cerevisiae strain. The xylose utilization pathway was constituted with three fungal enzymes, XR, XDH and XKS, from our previous study. This pathway has been confirmed to use xylose as the sole carbon source. The XF3 strain was selected from our previous study in which we over-expressed a bird FAR to produce the 1-hexdecanol and engineered the yeast lipid metabolism to further improve the fatty alcohol production. b Plasmid design for promoter engineering to further improve the xylose-based fatty alcohol production. We designed 27 different plasmids to exhaust all of the combinations of the promoters in front of XR, XDH, and XKS whose strengths were low, medium and high, respectively. The fatty alcohol production and growth behavior were monitored in these 27 recombinant strains