Cutaneotrichosporon oleaginosus: A Versatile Whole-Cell Biocatalyst for the Production of Single-Cell Oil from Agro-Industrial Wastes

Cutaneotrichosporon oleaginosus is an oleaginous yeast with several favourable qualities: It is fast growing, accumulates high amounts of lipids and has a very broad substrate spectrum. Its resistance to hydrolysis by-products makes it a promising biocatalyst for custom tailored microbial oils. C. oleaginosus can accumulate up to 60 wt.% of its biomass as lipids. This species is able to grow by using several compounds as a substrate, such as acetic acid, biodiesel-derived glycerol, N-acetylglucosamine, lignocellulosic hydrolysates, wastepaper and other agro-industrial wastes. This review is focused on state-of-the-art innovative and sustainable biorefinery schemes involving this promising yeast and second- and third-generation biomasses. Moreover, this review offers a comprehensive and updated summary of process strategies, biomass pretreatments and fermentation conditions for enhancing lipid production by C. oleaginosus as a whole-cell biocatalyst. Finally, an overview of the main industrial applications of single-cell oil is reported together with future perspectives

Cutaneotrichosporon oleaginosus: Cell Factory per la produzione di olio di nuova generazione

The route to a sustainable bioeconomy requires the development of robust biobased processes, which enable an efficient transformation of complex low-cost biomasses into added-value bioproducts. One of the main biobased products is the microbial oil from oleaginous yeast species, which have long been recognised as an alternative resource for biodiesel production. However, the costs associated to the production of microbial lipids starting from high-quality carbon sources remain prohibitively high for the process scale-up and commercialization. For this reason, the use of low-cost substrates represents one key issue to make microbial lipids production sustainable. Microbial lipids, also known as single cell oils (SCO), can be produced from a number of renewable resources. Oleaginous microorganisms can convert biomass sugars into lipids up to more than 20% of their dry mass. The lipogenesis process is triggered by specific culture conditions, namely nitrogen, phosphate or sulphate limitations. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the metabolic features of Cutaneotrichosporon oleaginosus, an oleaginous yeast with several favourable qualities: it is fast growing, it accumulates high amounts of lipid and has a very broad substrate spectrum. Its resistance to hydrolysis by-products and genetic accessibility make it a promising Cell Factory for custom tailored microbial oils. C. oleaginosus can accumulate up to 60% of its biomass as lipids, and several studies in the literature have optimized fermentation conditions to accumulate over 70% of its biomass as lipids. This work focused on the state of the art about innovative and sustainable biorefinery schemes involving the promising yeast C. oleaginosus. This species is able to grow by using as a substrate several compounds such as acetic acid, biodiesel-derived glycerol, aromatic compounds, N-acetylglucosamine (a by-product from the fish sector), cheese whey permeate, amino-rich wastes, agro-industrial waste, wastepaper and activated sludge. Finally, the main engineering techniques of C. oleaginosus were reported as further improvement of the strain to produce microbial lipids. To conclude, this work highlights the great metabolic capacities of this yeast and the possible engineering processes as a further step towards an increasingly sustainable production of a new generation oil

Circulating Cell-Free DNA in Renal Cell Carcinoma: The New Era of Precision Medicine

Tumor biopsy is still the gold standard for diagnosing and prognosis renal cell carcinoma (RCC). However, its invasiveness, costs, and inability to accurately picture tumor heterogeneity represent major limitations to this procedure. Analysis of circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) is a non-invasive cost-effective technique that has the potential to ease cancer detection and prognosis. In particular, a growing body of evidence suggests that cfDNA could be a complementary tool to identify and prognosticate RCC while providing contemporary mutational profiling of the tumor. Further, recent research highlighted the role of cfDNA methylation profiling as a novel method for cancer detection and tissue-origin identification. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive applications of cfDNA in RCC, with a specific focus on the potential role of cell-free methylated DNA (cfMeDNA)