Engineering Biocatalytic Solar Fuel Production: The PHOTOFUEL Consortium.

The EU Horizon2020 consortium PHOTOFUEL joined academic and industrial partners from biology, chemistry, engineering, engine design, and lifecycle assessment, making tremendous progress towards engine-ready fuels from CO via engineered photosynthetic microbes. Technical, environmental, economic, and societal opportunities and challenges were explored to frame future technology realization at scale.

Simultaneous extraction and purification of fucoxanthin from Tisochrysis lutea microalgae using compressed fluids.

The marine microalga Tisochrysis lutea, a Haptophyta with a thin cell wall and currently used mainly in aquaculture is a potential source of several bioactive compounds of interest such as carotenoids. In the present study, the simultaneous extraction and purification of fucoxanthin, the main carotenoid from T. lutea, was optimized using pressurized fluid extraction followed by in-cell purification.

A new flagellated dispersion stage in , a pathogen of .

The blastocladialean fungus Boussiba, Zarka and James is a devastating pathogen of the commercially valuable green microalga , a natural source of the carotenoid pigment astaxanthin. First identified in commercial cultivation facilities, is hypothesised to have a complex life cycle that switches between a vegetative and a resting phase depending on favourable or unfavourable growth conditions. Rather unusually for blastocladialean fungi, was described as lacking flagellated zoospores and only propagating via aplanosporic amoeboid cells.

Pilot-scale cultivation of wall-deficient transgenic Chlamydomonas reinhardtii strains expressing recombinant proteins in the chloroplast.

Microalgae have emerged as potentially powerful platforms for the production of recombinant proteins and high-value products. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a potentially important host species due to the range of genetic tools that have been developed for this unicellular green alga. Transformation of the chloroplast genome offers important advantages over nuclear transformation, and a wide range of recombinant proteins have now been expressed in the chloroplasts of C.

Remodeling of intermediate metabolism in the diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum under nitrogen stress.

Diatoms are unicellular algae that accumulate significant amounts of triacylglycerols as storage lipids when their growth is limited by nutrients. Using biochemical, physiological, bioinformatics, and reverse genetic approaches, we analyzed how the flux of carbon into lipids is influenced by nitrogen stress in a model diatom, Phaeodactylum tricornutum. Our results reveal that the accumulation of lipids is a consequence of remodeling of intermediate metabolism, especially reactions in the tricarboxylic acid and the urea cycles.

Metabolic switching of central carbon metabolism in response to nitrate: application to autofermentative hydrogen production in cyanobacteria.

Nitrate removal from culture media is widely used to enhance autofermentative hydrogen production in cyanobacteria during dark anaerobiosis. Here we have performed a systematic inventory of carbon and nitrogen metabolites, redox pools, and excreted product fluxes which show that addition of nitrate to cultures of Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002 has no influence on glycogen catabolic rate, but shifts the distribution of excreted products from predominantly lactate and H2 to predominantly CO2 and nitrite, while increasing the total consumption of intracellular reducing equivalents (mainly glycogen) by 3-fold.

Natural osmolytes are much less effective substrates than glycogen for catabolic energy production in the marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. strain PCC 7002.

ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase, encoded by glgC, catalyzes the first step of glycogen and glucosylglycer(ol/ate) biosynthesis. Here we report the construction of the first glgC null mutant of a marine cyanobacterium (Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002) and investigate its impact on dark anoxic metabolism (autofermentation).

Altered carbohydrate metabolism in glycogen synthase mutants of Synechococcus sp. strain PCC 7002: Cell factories for soluble sugars.

Glycogen and compatible solutes are the major polymeric and soluble carbohydrates in cyanobacteria and function as energy reserves and osmoprotectants, respectively. Glycogen synthase null mutants (glgA-I glgA-II) were constructed in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. strain PCC 7002.