Lipidomics maps oil accumulation and remodeling in oleaginous yeast

Researchers at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with colleagues at Dalian University of Technology, have built a high-coverage lipidomics workflow and combined it with transcriptomics to study how the oleaginous yeast Rhodosporidium toruloides builds and remodels its oil under nitrogen limitation. The team was led by Profs. XU Guowang and LIU Xinyu, and the study was published in Food Chemistry.

Microbial oils are considered promising sustainable lipid sources for food and biofuel applications. R. toruloides can accumulate substantial amounts of oil, but earlier work concentrated mainly on total lipid production and overall fatty acid composition. How individual lipid species changed across cultivation stages had been poorly characterized, which limited efforts to control oil quality rather than oil quantity alone.

To close that gap, the researchers established a liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry-based lipidomics workflow that combines quantitative structure–retention relationship modeling with complementary mass-spectral database matching. This pairing allowed the identification and quantification of 1,206 lipid species across 26 subclasses, covering both storage and structural lipids in unusual detail for a microbial oil study.

Using this workflow, the team identified two distinct stages of lipid production under nitrogen limitation. Triacylglycerols, the main storage lipids, accumulated rapidly and peaked at 144 hours of cultivation. During subsequent cultivation, major triacylglycerol and diacylglycerol species declined, while polyunsaturated lipids became relatively enriched, revealing a compositional remodeling process that total lipid measurements had masked.

The compositional shifts carried practical implications. Compared with common edible oils, the microbial oil produced between 48 and 168 hours showed some compositional similarities to palm oil. At 216 hours, the oil contained a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids, indicating a distinct fatty acid profile with potential nutritional relevance. According to the researchers, these findings suggest that cultivation time could help tailor both oil yield and composition.

The authors state that the study provides a basis for evaluating microbial oil composition and for exploring tailored production strategies, in which fermentation duration becomes a tunable parameter rather than a fixed endpoint.

The work appeared in Food Chemistry under the title Multi-omics analysis revealed oil accumulation and compositional remodeling in Rhodosporidium toruloides under nitrogen limitation, with the DOI 10.1016/j.foodchem.2026.151581. The news release describing the study was issued on 3 November 2026, and the article carried a publication date of 14 October 2026.

Subject of Research: Lipid accumulation and compositional remodeling in the oleaginous yeast Rhodosporidium toruloides under nitrogen limitation

Article Title: Researchers reveal mechanisms of lipid accumulation and compositional remodeling in oleaginous yeast

Article References: Researchers reveal mechanisms of lipid accumulation and compositional remodeling in oleaginous yeast. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

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Keywords: oleaginous yeast, Rhodosporidium toruloides, lipidomics, microbial oil, nitrogen limitation, triacylglycerols, polyunsaturated fatty acids, transcriptomics, Food Chemistry, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, cultivation time, sustainable lipids