Genetic Engineering of Algae for Enhanced Biofuel Production
By Randor Radakovits, R. Jinkerson, A. Darzins, M. Posewitz. Eukaryotic Cell, 2010
1,074 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT There are currently intensive global research efforts aimed at increasing and modifying the accumulation of lipids, alcohols, hydrocarbons, polysaccharides, and other energy storage compounds in photosynthetic organisms, yeast, and bacteria through genetic engineering. Many improvements have been realized, including increased lipid and carbohydrate production, improved H2 yields, and the diversion of central metabolic intermediates into fungible biofuels. Photosynthetic microorganisms are attracting considerable interest within these efforts due to their relatively high photosynthetic conversion efficiencies, diverse metabolic capabilities, superior growth rates, and ability to store or secrete energy-rich hydrocarbons. Relative to cyanobacteria, eukaryotic microalgae possess several unique metabolic attributes of relevance to biofuel production, including the accumulation of significant quantities of triacylglycerol; the synthesis of storage starch (amylopectin and amylose), which is similar to that found in higher plants; and the ability to efficiently couple photosynthetic electron transport to H2 production. Although the application of genetic engineering to improve energy production phenotypes in eukaryotic microalgae is in its infancy, significant advances in the development of genetic manipulation tools have recently been achieved with microalgal model systems and are being used to manipulate central carbon metabolism in these organisms. It is likely that many of these advances can be extended to industrially relevant organisms. This review is focused on potential avenues of genetic engineering that may be undertaken in order to improve microalgae as a biofuel platform for the production of biohydrogen, starch-derived alcohols, diesel fuel surrogates, and/or alkanes.
Subfields: Molecular Biology, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/108b44614efc71bc97568e2f624bd0633f4961ce
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In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Biodiesel Production From Algae to Overcome the Energy Crisis (2017, background): “…many advances through genetic engineering in photosynthetic microorganisms have been achieved, because of their capability to secrete or store energy-rich hydrocarbons, superior growth rates, diverse metabolic abilities and high photosynthetic conversion efficiencies (Radakovits et al., 2010).”
- Algae for Biofuels and Energy (2013, background): “Limnol Oceanogr 8:184–206 Arad S, Richmond A (2004) Industrial production of microalgal cell-mass and secondary products – species of high potential: Porphyridium sp. In: Richmond A (ed) Microalgal culture: biotechnology and applied phycology. Blackwell Science, Oxford, pp 289–297 Avron M, Ben-Amotz”
- Sustainable biofuels from algae (2013, methodology): “Species improvement by mutation and genetic engineering is being proposed and applied to achieve this (Dunahay et al. 1996; Melis et al. 1999; Torzillo et al. 2009; Roessler et al. 2009; Radakovits et al. 2010 ).”
- Transcriptome and Gene Expression Analysis of an Oleaginous Diatom Under Different Salinity Conditions (2013, neutral): “To date, attempts to increase the lipid content in various systems by overexpressing ACCase have been somewhat disappointing [18].”
- Astaxanthin-Producing Green Microalga Haematococcus pluvialis: From Single Cell to High Value Commercial Products (2016, background): “In principle, genetic engineering of microalgae has been reported for over 30 strains of various species, including Haematococcus (Rosenberg et al., 2008; Radakovits et al., 2010; Forján et al., 2015).”
- Effect of Fermentation on Enhancing the Nutraceutical Properties of Arthrospira platensis (Spirulina) (2019, neutral): “It is believed that the key to their success lies in their unique metabolism and cytoplasmic composition, which also makes them excellent nutraceutical candidates for the highly demanding modern food industry constantly seeking to create healthier, cheaper, more convenient novel foods [76].”
- Strategies to enhance production of microalgal biomass and lipids for biofuel feedstock (2017, background): “Thus, transgenic strategies used in higher plants can also be applied to microalgae (Radakovits et al., 2010).”
- The Enzymatic Conversion of Major Algal and Cyanobacterial Carbohydrates to Bioethanol (2016, background): “Exceptions to this are the red algae, Dinophyta (Dinoflagellates), and Glaucophyta, which store their food reserves in the cytosol (Radakovits et al., 2010).”