Intracellular amino and nonamino organic acids profiling of Trichosporon cutaneum on rich and limited nitrogen conditions for lipid production

Trichosporon cutaneum is an oleaginous yeast capable of fermenting lignocellulosic sugars to produce lipid. Though numerous literature focused on lipid production under the condition of nitrogen source limitation, there is no information about intracellular metabolic changes involved in this process. In this study, metabolomic profiling of amino and nonamino organic acids was conducted to characterize the key metabolites and pathways. It was found that aspartic acid, ornithine, asparagine, glutamic acid, 4-amino-n-butyricacid, proline, lysine etc. were closely related to lipid production, and the pathway analysis showed that seven pathways may be related to lipid production with limited nitrogen source. This study provided a detailed dataset describing the changes of intracellular amino and nonamino organic acids when nitrogen was limited and lipid was accumulated, which added new knowledge on the mechanism of lipid accumulation and could be used for metabolic analysis of fermentation process as well as industrial strain improvement in the future.