Biodiesel industry has received much attention due to the shortage of fossil oil and increasing awareness of environmental issue.For its sustainable development, however, it is important to insure that the oil feedstock can be produced continually without competing with food industry.For this purpose, there is now an increasing interest in obtaining microbial lipids from oleaginous microorganisms as a non-food oil feedstock for biodiesel production, which allows for taking advantages of various locally available raw-materials including lignocelluloses and biodiesel byproduct glycerol.Rhodosporidium toruloides (R.toruloides) was demonstrated to be a promising candidate for lipid production.We have found out that lignocellulosic hydrolyzates can be converted to triacylglycerols after a proper pretreatment and detoxification of the lignocelluloses biomass.Furthermore, microbial conversion of biodiesel byproduct glycerol to triacylglycerols was proposed and investigated.The crude glycerols were derived from different biodiesel production processes.As a result, it was indicated that compared with refined glycerol, the crude glycerol could obtain significantly higher biomass concentration and lipid yield.Further study was performed to investigate the individual effects of some representative compounds which were present in crude glycerol as impurities.It was found that within the general concentration ranges, only methanol displayed somewhat inhibitive effect, while others could even enhance cell growth and lipid accumulation.These results indicated that crude glycerol could be directly converted to triacylglycerols by R.toruloides without purification.In addition, the fatty acid compositional profile of the yeast lipids was analyzed and proved to be similar to that of vegetable oils, thus can be suitable oil feedstock for biodiesel production.