ALGAE: BORN TO BE BIOFUEL

Forget corn and sugar, forget cellulosic dreams. Algae could be the breakthrough biofuel. It has none of the drawbacks of food crop use (like corn and sugar and soy) and requires no new enzymatic processing (like cellulosic). It turns into a biocrude as malleable as petroleum crude. It gives off greenhouse gas emissions at the tailpipe but can be grown on captured power plant emissions. Needs more development.

Green alga genome project catalogs carbon capture machinery; Reveals identity as ancient cousin of land plants and anmimals
David Gilbert, October 11, 2007 (EurekAlert)

WHO
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii ("Chlamy"), the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) (Daniel Rokhsar, Simon Prochnik, Arthur Grossman, Sabeeha Merchant, co-leaders); the University of California, Los Angeles; the Carnegie Institution; 100+ international collaborators, 5 national labs (Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest) and the Stanford Human Genome Center

Algae's efficiency as a biofuel is pretty impressive. (click to enlarge)

WHAT
The study Chlamy’s genome, a single-celled organism less than 1/1000 of an inch across, has enlarged understanding of photosynthesis, opening the way for dramatic improvements in the use of algae for capturing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and creating biofuels.

WHEN
Findings published October 12.

WHERE
- Published in the journal “Science.”
- Research facilitated at DOE JGI's Walnut Creek, CA, Production Genomics Facility

WHY
- Chlamy is 1/50 of a grain of salt.
- Chlamy stands at junction the point in evolution when plants and animals became differentiated.
- Photosynthesis is the process by which plants and algae inhale carbon dioxide and, in the presence of sunlight, turn it into energy.
- Algae can be used to capture solar energy, consume GHG emissions, detoxify soil and generate “biocrude” that can be processed into biofuels.
- One focus will be on algae chloroplasts, the cell’s “solar panel” that absorbs light and transforms it, with carbon dioxide and water, into energy. The energy is a kind of sugar (carbohydrate) that can be used to make biofuel.
- 15,000+ genes in Chlamy’s genome, 7000+ shared with other organisms and 2000+ of them shared w/BOTH humans AND flowering plants, strongly supporting the evolutionary model.
- The study also looks at Chlamy’s flagella, a tail-like attachment that gives it motility (mobility). Defects in flagella genes apply to many human pathologies.

Here is the schematic of how it is processed into fuel. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- Rokhsar: "The Chlamy genome is like a green time capsule that affords a view into the complex core machinery that gave rise to today's energy-capturing and oxygen-producing chloroplasts," "DOE JGI's particular interest in Chlamy centers on its keen ability to efficiently capture and convert sunlight into energy, and its role in managing the global pool of carbon,"
- Merchant: "Chlamy's code helps us describe the ancient ancestor of plants and animals that lived over a billion years ago…The work has generated a clear roadmap for exploring the roles of numerous genes in photosynthetic function, for defining the structure and dynamic aspects of flagellar function, and for understanding how the soil environment, with its large fluctuations in nutrients, has molded the functionality of organisms through evolutionary time."
- Prochnik, commenting on Chlamy’s superior nutritional efficiency: "Yet Chlamy possesses the largest known array of enzymes that manufacture the signaling molecules cyclic AMP and cyclic GMP. These cyclic nucleotides play key roles in shuttling nutrients into the cell, controlling motility of the organism via flagellar function, and determine sexual development…"
- Grossman: "Although Chlamydomonas is a plant, there are clear similarities between this photosynthetic organism and animals that would surprise the average person on the street…Just 20 years ago, no one would have guessed that an alga would have retained many of the functions we associate with humans and would be useful for developing a basic understanding of certain human diseases."