SOLEIL, French national synchrotron facility

Project number: 20181079
Period covered - start date: 01.03.2019
Period covered - end date: 31.07.2019
Project's coordinator: NMBU and SOLEIL

Collaboration:
SOLEIL synchrotron, SMIS beamline
Date of experiments: 11.-17.06.2019.

Lipids are major components of food and feed, and they are important industrial resources. By 2050, agricultural and fossil raw materials will not be able to meet the demand for lipids, causing a strong need for alternative sources. Oleaginous fungi have the potential to facilitate commercial production of lipids with the targeted chemical composition. Fungal lipids are localized in globular intracellular organelles - lipid bodies (LBs). The optimization of fungal lipid production is usually done by genetic or substrate manipulations that result in chemically diverse LBs. However, the LBs’ chemical diversity and their dynamics are far from being understood. The understanding of the LBs’ chemical diversity would have a strong impact on the understanding of LBs’ plasticity and the regulation of intracellular lipid storage. This could provide the scientific basis for producing chemically homogenous LBs with a targeted lipid composition. In order to get deeper understanding of the fungal lipid accumulation the project aims to investigate the spectral signatures of fungal lipid bodies on single lipid body level by infrared imaging.