Production of desaturated fatty alcohols and desaturated fatty acyl acetates in yeast

A method for production of a pheromone composition comprising desaturated fatty alcohols and/or desaturated fatty alcohol acetates, said method comprising the steps of:

• A. Providing a yeast cell and incubating said yeast cell in a medium, wherein the yeast cell expresses:
• i) at least one heterologous desaturase capable of introducing at least one double bond in a fatty acyl-CoA having a carbon chain length of 14, thereby converting at least part of said fatty acyl-CoA to a desaturated fatty acyl-CoA, wherein said desaturase is selected from the group consisting of a Δ9 desaturase and a Δ11 desaturase;
• and:
• a) has an amino acid sequence having at least 80% homology to the Δ9 desaturase from Drosophila melanogaster as set forth in SEQ ID NO:
• 10;
• b) has an amino acid sequence having at least 80% homology to the Δ9 desaturase from Spodoptera litura as set forth in SEQ ID NO:
• 12;
• c) has an amino acid sequence having at least 80% homology to the Δ11 desaturase from Choristoneura parallela as set forth in SEQ ID NO:
• 66;
• or
• d) has an amino acid sequence having at least 80% homology to the Δ11 desaturase from Choristoneura rosaceana as set forth in SEQ ID NO:
• 65;
• and
• ii) at least one heterologous fatty acyl-CoA reductase, capable of converting at least part of said desaturated fatty acyl-CoA to a desaturated fatty alcohol, thereby producing said desaturated fatty alcohols;
• wherein the desaturase has a higher specificity towards tetradecanoyl-CoA than towards hexadecanoyl-CoA and/or wherein the fatty acyl-CoA reductase has a higher specificity towards desaturated tetradecanoyl-CoA than towards desaturated hexadecanoyl-CoA,
• B. Converting at least part of the desaturated fatty alcohols produced by the yeast cell to desaturated fatty alcohol acetates, thereby producing said desaturated fatty alcohol acetates, and
• C. Formulating the desaturated fatty alcohols and/or the desaturated fatty alcohol acetates into a pheromone composition together with one or more additional compounds.