Could the study of genome transplant and biofuels create a profitable market for the transportation sector on a global scale? Perhaps they could provide serious progress in that direction if funding for research was advanced enough at the moment, but as of July 2007, no one has been working on microalgal strain re-writes that make effective use of transplants to power an algal cell. Could the problem be government funding?
So far, only scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., have been able to effectively transplant a genome from one species and insert it into another and getting it to reproduce the donor species with desirable surface qualities from the host species from the available proteins of the recipient cell.
And this is in a totally different area from biodiesel production; they were messing around with some nasty critters that make cows and sheep sick. Essentially though, what they have done is make leaps in their field of research, synthetic genomics.
The basic desire for those in the field of synthetic genomics is to produce a modification on pre-existing life forms with the intention of producing either a desired product or behavior in the newly created life form, without being limited to naturally occurring genes, but also being able to custom design their own base pair series.
This experiment is a breakthrough in synthetic genomics because the proteins available from the recipient were enough to feed reproduction; if foreign proteins had been necessary it would have really made a barrier for this field of research.
High productivity and high lipid content are the desirable traits in biodiesel production and efforts in this direction have been analyzed using mutagenesis or genetic engineering by manipulating algal biosynthetic pathways to produce strains with higher lipid levels.
One interesting possibility for higher productivity and higher lipid content would be in the field of genetic modification where key genes are introduced or repressed to regulate lipid synthesis, this had some study done with research that performed a series of experiments that looked to understand what was required to produce mutants in microalgae. Lack of knowledge in microbiology always made it harder to fund those kinds of experiments back in the 1980s and especially the 1990s.
The whole trend into synthetic genomics is that it would make things a lot more energetically efficient; allowing the new organism to just do the job it was designed to do, like acomputer or a synthetic chemical.
In this case, get fat and reproduce heavily on what little sunlight or resources are available, without any competition from other organisms, yes a controlled environment would be best for this new form of supercharged algae for strictly biodiesel production!
In nature, things have occurred over aeons that have naturally selected existing micro-algae to thrive and coexist in this perfect ecosystem that is our planet, and a lot of their genomes are geared just to help them survive out there in the wild, but why would a future biofuel need to survive in the wild?
Too much energy goes into those complicated genomic structures that Mother Nature engineered, and synthetic genomics looks to create new creatures to do a certain, exact and useful job. For example: producing highly productive micro-algae with lipid contents that double artificial yields compared to those available straight out of Natures womb?
That is only wishful thinking, but nowhere near impossible with current technological advances such as genome transplants. What if they used the new field of synthetic genomics to strategically build a genome that was ideal to the production of biofuel and inserted it into an existing ideal microalgal strain?
Well, it might surely take more than 150,000 attempts, but for those who know biodiesel, microalgae seems to already be the most economic way to produce biodiesel from what Mother Nature put here on Earth, something like 60% oil in some cases, what if they made one that was 90% oil and twice as productive?
Well, that is enough speculation for today, but has the discovery of the genome transplant furthered scientific inquiry? Absolutely yes! Now, could we turn this into something useful with micro-algae strictly for biofuel production? Only proper funding and interdisciplinary dialogue between these two distinct types of engineers will harness an experiment in that direction.
News:
Bacteria genome switch-a-roo
DNA Synthesis Method Yields 15-kb Gene Cluster
Prvious Article:
Biodiesel from Algae
