Industrial microalgae: Microalgae cell plants are entering the "Designer Oil" era.

Industrial oil-producing microalgae can be used by photosynthlon to scale carbon dioxide and water directly into high energy density grease molecules (triglycerides; TAG).
the saturation of the carbon chain of fatty acids on triglycerides determines whether algal oil is suitable for biodiesel or as a nutrient.
, saturation is one of the most critical factors in determining the quality, use and economic value of algae oil.
, however, can the rational design of algal oil saturation be realized based on industrial microalgae chassis cells? The international cooperation team led by the Single Cell Center of Qingdao Institute of Bioenermaceuticals and Processes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, including the University of Maryland, Peking University, the Institute of Aquatic Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, etc., demonstrated that the algal oil saturation of industrial microalgae can be customized and artificially designed to push the microalgae cell plant into the "Algae Quality" era by clarifying and regulating the division and cooperation mechanism of a series of endogenic diglycerinyl transfer enzymes (DGAT2) in micro-physiology.
work was published online October 27 in Molecular Plant.
micro-algae is a kind of industrial microalgae that can be cultivated outdoor son-in-hand in all parts of the world, which has outstanding advantages such as fast growth speed, strong carbon dioxide tolerance, strong accumulation of grease, seawater fresh water can be cultured, and so it has become one of the main research models and industrial representative algae species in the field of bioenergy at home and abroad.
micro-gloa-algae oil contains both saturated fatty acids (SFA), monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFa) and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFa).
if muFA content is high, algal oil is suitable as a high-quality liquid fuel to serve the energy market, and if PUFA (e.g. EPA, etc.) is high, algal oil is more suitable as a human health products, serving the nutrition and food market.
Therefore, if the human-controlled and even rational design of SFA, MUFA, PUFA ratio can be achieved in the same chassis cell, a highly controllable and flexible switching of algae oil quality, use and value can be achieved.
The characteristics of this cell factory are important for adapting to the changing bioenermaceutical market demand and minimize the cost of product production and switching, as well as for building carbon dioxide-based "single carbon photo-multi-production models" in harsh and extreme environments such as Mars, which provide special strategic value for the flexible and controllable synthesis of energy, materials and food essential for human survival.
previous discoveries, such as monocellular centers, have encoded up to 11 type II dicerinl cellalythease coding genes (DGAT2) in the marine microsphere algae genome, and their catalytic triglycerides synthesis are the final step.
animals and higher plants often have only 1-2 DGAT2, why do marine microspheres have more DGAT2 family members than all known species? In order to answer the above questions, the researchers found that DGAT2A, DGAT2D and DGAT2C had TAG synthase activity, and that the three DGAT2 family members preferred saturated, monosaturated and polysaturated lipid CoA substrates, respectively.
based on this, the researchers proposed a large reverbetry model of grease synthesis mechanisms than the previous work (Li, et al, Plant Cell, 2014), which, in three different ancestors, DGAT2A, DGAT2D and DGAT2C, formed a very different but complementary background preference strain in the long-term co-evolution process, and performed a subtle functional and space-time collaboration on the tag synthesis line.
surprisingly, the relative abundance of DGAT2A, DGAT2D, and DGAT2C transcripts is positively related to the ratio of SFA, MUFA and PUFA on TAG, indicating a subtle but concise algal oil saturation control mechanism.
We use this, the researchers went one step further, by artificially controlling the relative abundance of transcripts between DGAT2A, DGAT2D and DGAT2C, and realized the rational design of the proportion of SFA, MUFA and PUFA in algae oil, thus producing saturation "customized" algae oil.
the nearly 20 micro-algae engineering strains of TAG products, SFA, MUFA and PUFA proportion of the change rate reached 1.3 times, 3.7 times and 11.2 times, respectively, indicating that in a single industrial microalgae chassis, algae oil as a fuel or nutrition products of the use and value of good control and plasticity.
work was done in collaboration with the laboratories of Xu Jian of Qingdao Energy Institute, Li Yantao of the University of Maryland and Liu Jin of Peking University, and was assisted by researchers such as Hu Qiang and Hu Weihua of the Institute of Aquatic Sciences.
the paper co-authored the single-cell center of Qingdao Energy, XinYi, Lu Yandu and Yi-Ying Lee of the University of Maryland.
this paper and its preliminary work have been supported by the National Fund for Distinguished Youth, the Ministry of Science and Technology 863 Synthetic Biology Special Project, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Carbon Gas Biomass Manufacturing Project, the Shandong Province Natural Science Youth Fund and the National Natural Science Foundation of the United States.
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