Developing Molecular Genetic Tools to Facilitate Economic Production in Green Algae.

摘要

It is now accepted that algae have enormous potential to generate economically viable and environmentally sustainable liquid fuels that can help mitigate the effects of a diminishing supply of fossil fuel. The achievement of economic biofuel production from any algal species will almost certainly require advanced genetic techniques. Although these tools are available for model algal species they are not readily available for algae that are being identified as potential biofuel production strains. Our work was focused on developing the genetic tools required to enable green algae to become efficient biofuel production strains. Being able to efficiently apply genetic transformation techniques to green algae species will allow us to generate strains that contain ideal traits for maximally efficient fuel production, and will also enable crop protection, improved nutrient utilization, and increased harvesting efficiency, all of which will help drive the economic viability of algal fuel production. Algae have two genomes that are typically transformed: the nuclear genome and the chloroplast genome, and each of these genomes require distinct sets of transformation vectors and protocols. In this proposal we aimed to improve the potential of marine algae by developing genetic tools for chloroplast through the following aims.