Several research groups have used VFAs to produce lipids by culturing oleaginous yeasts including Yarrowia lipolytica and Cryp-tococcus curvatus (Christophe et al., 2012; Fontanille et al., 2012). The most significant difference was that in our study the microor-
ganisms utilized mannitol and VFAs which were all derived from seaweed without addition of any other nutrients and reagents, whereas in other research, oleaginous yeasts used a synthetic med-ium containing glucose and acetate as substrates. Moreover, in other research the ratio of carbon to nitrogen (C/N) was artificially controlled by continuously adding carbon and nitrogen sources to achieve high lipid concentration and content. But in our work, we just utilized the original mannitol supernatant and alginate fer-mentation effluents to culture the oleaginous yeasts. We compared our results to other researches that also used VFAs or acetate as carbon sources (Table 4). In fact, little research has examined the feasibility of using mannitol as a carbon source for oleaginous yeasts. In addition, the strains and concentration of carbon source used were all different with each research. There-fore, the only relevant comparisons was of the value of lipid con-tent (% W/W). Among these results, apparently the lipid content in this work (48.30%) was higher than that of any other researches. It indicated that the mannitol and VFAs derived from alginate anaerobic fermentation were favorable for microbial lipid produc-tion even without using synthetic medium or artificially adding any other nutrients.