Solazyme's microbial oil technology represents a paradigm shift in the production of triglyceride oils for use in the chemical and food industries. First, the manipulation of oilseed traits in agriculture is a multi-year process. The time required to produce a new vegetable oil from product inception, through large scale field trials and seed production, whether utilizing traditional breeding, agricultural biotechnology or a combination of the two, can easily span 7-10 years. This new microbial oil process significantly reduces the time horizon required to produce entirely new oils, generating multi-kilogram samples in a few months scaling to metric tons in less than a year, depending on the oil type. Second, the types of oils that can be produced using traditional oilseed crops can be limited due to constraints in the available germplasm, an inability to carry out robust genetic engineering and cultivar improvement or the inherent biology of oilseed development. This new microbial technology, on the other hand, is comprised of a highly facile genetic engineering toolkit that can precisely target gene insertion events resulting in exquisite temporal and spatial regulation of gene expression. Utilizing these tools, oils can now be tailored to have dramatically altered chain length and saturation levels relative to that seen in our base algal strain and this tailoring can be combined with an ability to control regiospecificity of fatty acid insertion on the glycerol backbone, resulting in the generation of oils with dramatically altered physical properties. Once generated, such strains can be evolved quite rapidly using standard microbial strain improvement methodologies. In addition, the biology of this oil production process separates oil production from cell growth, allowing for the elaboration of oils that are simply not possible in traditional oilseed crops as they would greatly impair oilseed development.
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