Widely used oil-based plastics could be replaced with bioplastics made from renewable resources. But one potential type of building block for such materials, omega-hydroxy fatty acids, is difficult and expensive to synthesize using traditional methods. Richard Gross and his team at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn show that an engineered yeast can pump out the compounds at high yields.

In the yeast Candida tropicalis, the team eliminated 16 genes coding for enzymes that would normally oxidize the key alcohol groups in omega-hydroxy fatty acids. Furthermore, strains expressing other selected enzymes could convert other fatty acids with varying chain lengths and other properties into the desired molecules.

J. Am. Chem. Soc. doi:10.1021/ja107707v (2010)