Ethanol fermentation from food wastes containing mainly starch without carrying out sterilization was investigated
by using wild and tolerant yeast, Issatchenkia orientalis MF-121. The MF-121 strain is not a suitable choice for ethanol
fermentation from lignocellulosic biomass because it is only capable of fermenting hexoses of glucose, mannose, and
fructose to ethanol. Therefore, we first isolated acid- and salt-tolerant yeast that are capable of fermenting various
monosaccharides to ethanol, and the isolated yeast that showed the ability to ferment ethanol from glucose, mannose,
galactose, fructose, and xylose, was identified as Zygoascus hellenicus LK-5G on the basis of the 26S rRNA sequence
analysis.