Hao Xu

Fatty alcohol, a traditional petrochemical, now can be produced in a more environmentally friendly way by many microbial cell factories like E. coli and S. cerevisiae. However, R. toruloides, an oleaginous yeast famous for its high lipid content, is a more promising chassis for fatty alcohol production. As a less-domesticated non-model organism, a lack of genetic tools is limiting its metabolic engineering trials. My research interest involves developing and utilizing novel genetic tools to improve fatty alcohol production in R. toruloides.