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Publications (167)
To support a global population of ~10 billion people in 2050, dietary protein demand is forecast to increase 32-78% compared to 2017, requiring significantly higher planetary resources. Microalgae are an attractive sustainable protein source compared with current plant and animal sources. Benefits include mass scalability, low CO2 emissions, and si...
Microalgal chloroplasts, such as those of the model organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, are emerging as a new platform to produce recombinant proteins, including industrial enzymes, diagnostics, as well as animal and human therapeutics. Improving transgene expression and final recombinant protein yields, at laboratory and industrial scales, require...
We are increasingly challenged to operate within our planetary boundaries, while delivering on United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2030 targets, and net-zero emissions by 2050. Failure to solve these challenges risks economic, social, political, climate, food, water, and fuel security. Therefore, new, scalable, and adoptable circ...
Pigments are intensely coloured compounds used in many industries to colour other materials. The demand for naturally synthesised pigments is increasing and their production can be incorporated into circular bioeconomy approaches. Natural pigments are produced by bacteria, cyanobacteria, microalgae, macroalgae, plants and animals. There is a huge u...
Background:
By co-culturing selected microalgae and heterotrophic microorganisms, the growth rate of microalgae can be improved even under atmospheric conditions with a low CO2 concentration. However, the detailed mechanism of improvement of proliferative capacity by co-culture has not been elucidated. In this study, we investigated changes in the...
Microalgae-based renewable fuels offer low carbon alternatives to fossil fuels, and can theoretically support energy and climate security, regional employment and sustainable development. However, to achieve price parity with fossil fuels and fast track scale up, a benchmark production price of US$0.67 L-1 ($2.54 gal−1) must be achieved. The financ...
Greenhouse (controlled environments) horticulture is expected to rise to ~USD 30 billion by 2023. In such climate-controlled systems, crop yields can increase ~10-fold compared with field production, due to higher water and nutrient efficiency and reduced external environmental impacts. The application of plant growth regulators (PGRs) can promote...
Using synthetic biology, it is now time to expand the biosynthetic repertoire of plants and microalgae by utilizing the chloroplast to augment the production of desired high-value compounds and of oil-, carbohydrate-, or protein-enriched biomass based on direct harvesting of solar energy and the consumption of CO2. Multistream product lines based o...
The global seaweed market is currently valued at USD $11 billion annually and utilizes about 29 million tonnes of seaweed (dry weight) for a variety of applications (Ferdouse et al., Globefish Res Programme 124:I, 2018). By 2025 the global market is estimated to reach USD $30.2 billion dollars (Bloomberg, 2020). The current Australian seaweed marke...
The removal of nitrogen (N) and sulphur (S) from biocrude oil produced using hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL), is important for the production of high quality renewable fuels. Here the effect of co-liquefaction of bagasse and algae was analysed. Algae (Chlorella vulgaris and Cyanobacteria) were mixed with bagasse (1:1) subjected to HTL at 250–350 °C...
Agriculture has radically changed the global nitrogen (N) cycle and is heavily dependent on synthetic N-fertiliser. However, the N-use efficiency of synthetic fertilisers is often only 50% with N-losses from crop systems polluting the biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. To address the large carbon and energy footprint of N-fertiliser synthesis a...
Abstract Background Microalgae-based high-density fuels offer an efficient and environmental pathway towards decarbonization of the transport sector and could be produced as part of a globally distributed network without competing with food systems for arable land. Variations in climatic and economic conditions significantly impact the economic fea...
Over 3 billion years, photosynthetic algae have evolved complex uses for cellulose, the most abundant polymer worldwide. A major cell-wall component of lignocellulosic plants, seaweeds, microalgae, and bacteria, cellulose can be processed to nanocellulose, a promising nanomaterial with novel properties. The structural diversity of macro- and microa...
Oxygenic photosynthetic organisms use solar energy to split water into protons, electrons, and oxygen. Unicellular green algae like Chlamydomonas reinhardtii have evolved the additional ability to reduce protons to produce hydrogen (H2) via chloroplast hydrogenases (HYDA1 and HYDA2) under light-driven anaerobic conditions. In wild type cells, H2 pr...
Recently there has been a significant increase in the amount and frequency of seaweed blooms of the holopelagic brown macroalgae Sargassum fluitans and natans (hereafter Sargassum) in the Atlantic Ocean. These blooms impose a major burden on residents (e.g. rotting beached Sargassum, unpleasant odor, toxic gases), the local economy of countries wit...
The microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii offers a rapid, scalable and low-cost platform for recombinant protein production. Its chloroplast provides a particularly robust expression system for high yield production of complex proteins requiring challenging post-transcriptional modifications. Controlled transgene expression provides an important adva...
Microalgae provide a powerful solar driven biotechnology platform for the production of the increasing quantity of food, fuel, high value products, fine chemicals and clean water required to supply our expanding global population. Light capture fuels all photosynthetically driven microalgae processes and consequently, maximizing light capture effic...
Access to affordable and clean energy is a United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal. The prospects for cheap, reliable, renewable stationary energy and electric vehicles have rapidly improved, driven by de‑carbonisation and sustainability agendas, enhanced policy interventions and maturing technology options. In contrast, low-carbon renewable l...
Microalgae-based bulk production, especially for biofuel, is not yet economically feasible. One way to improve financial performance of such systems is to maximise value through a biorefinery approach (e.g. co-production streams, waste minimization). This can be implemented via extraction of valuable intracellular compounds upon cell disruption; ho...
Advancing microalgae biotechnologies requires the design of high efficiency, large scale outdoor photobioreactor systems. Here we present a predictive biomass productivity model to define system design parameters yielding high biomass productivities for a facility encompassing arrays of cylindrical photobioreactors (PBRs) in a sub-tropical location...
Dewatering is one of the major constraints to the large scale production of microalgae biofuels, with many drawbacks in currently deployed technologies. Using an approach similar to papermaking, cationic polyacrylamide (CPAM) based flocculants can stabilize flocs of microalgae under turbulent conditions to achieve effective dewatering of dilute sus...
Photosynthetic microalgae are unicellular plants, many of which are rich in protein, lipids, and bioactives and form an important part of the base of the natural aquatic food chain. Population growth, demand for high-quality protein, and depletion of wild fishstocks are forecast to increase aquacultural fish demand by 37% between 2016 and 2030. Thi...
ABC toxins are pore-forming virulence factors produced by pathogenic bacteria. YenTcA is the pore-forming and membrane binding A subunit of the ABC toxin YenTc, produced by the insect pathogen Yersinia entomophaga. Here we present cryo-EM structures of YenTcA, purified from the native source. The soluble pre-pore structure, determined at an average...
The rapid accumulation of plastic waste is driving international demand for renewable plastics with superior qualities (e.g., full biodegradability to CO2 without harmful byproducts), as part of an expanding circular bioeconomy. Higher plants, microalgae, and cyanobacteria can drive solar-driven processes for the production of feedstocks that can b...
Significance
To optimize photosynthetic performance and minimize photooxidative damage, photosynthetic organisms evolved to efficiently balance light energy absorption and electron transport with cellular energy requirements under constantly changing light conditions. The regulation of linear electron flow (LEF) and cyclic electron flow (CEF) contr...
Microalgae biotechnologies are rapidly developing into new commercial settings. Several high value products already exist on the market, and systems development is focused on cost reduction to open up future economic opportunities for food, fuel and freshwater production. Light is a key environmental driver for photosynthesis and optimising light c...
The green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii provides a platform for cheap, scalable and safe production of complex proteins. Despite the fact that chloroplast gene expression in photosynthetic organisms is tightly regulated by light, most expression studies have analysed chloroplast recombinant protein production under constant light. Here, the influe...
The surface of our planet receives ∼3020 ZJ per year of solar energy annually, which is >5000 times the energy required to power our entire global economy (∼0.6 ZJ per year). Of this energy, ∼43% is photosynthetic active light radiation (PAR) that can be used to drive microalgal biotechnologies for the production of food, fuels, high value products...
Resolving the 3D architecture of cells to atomic resolution is one of the most ambitious challenges of cellular and structural biology. Central to this process is the ability to automate tomogram segmentation to identify sub-cellular components, facilitate molecular docking and annotate detected objects with associated metadata. Here we demonstrate...
As a biofuel feedstock, microalgae has good scalability and potential to supply a significant proportion of world energy compared to most types of biofuel feedstock. Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) is well-suited to wet biomass (such as microalgae) as it greatly reduces the energy requirements associated with dewatering and drying. This article pre...
The United Nations Conference on Climate Change (Paris 2015) reached an international agreement to keep the rise in global average temperature 'well below 2°C' and to 'aim to limit the increase to 1.5°C'. These reductions will have to be made in the face of rising global energy demand. Here a thoroughly validated dynamic econometric model (Eq 1) is...
PLOS_supps_v3.docx.
General Statistical Tests for the Energy Growth Model. (Table A). Multi-Variable Linear Model Represented as a Difference Equation of the Change in Levels, with Residuals (Figure A). Breusch-Godfrey Serial Correlation LM Test (Table B). Heteroskedasticity Test: Breusch-Pagan-Godfrey (Table C). Ramsey RESET Test (Table D). Augmen...
BACKGROUND: Hydrogen is a clean, versatile fuel and energy carrier which can be produced by a range of renewable technologies for combustion, use in fuel cells, or as a manufacturing feedstock. Despite its attraction and significant technological innovation, commercial feasibility of photobiological hydrogen processes is far from demonstrated. OBJE...
The global population is predicted to increase from ~7.3 billion to over 9 billion people by 2050. Together with rising economic growth, this is forecast to result in a 50% increase in fuel demand, which will have to be met while reducing carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions by 50-80% to maintain social, political, energy and climate security. This tens...
Outdoor microalgae systems are a promising platform for fuels and chemicals, but are currently limited by relatively low productivities. This study investigated the effects of photoacclimation on the productivity of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii grown under fluctuating light regimes which simulate well-mixed cultures in outdoor reactors. Simulations re...
The mechanosensitive channel of large conductance MscL is a well-characterized mechanically gated non-selective ion channel, which often serves as a prototype mechanosensitive channel for mechanotransduction studies. However, there are some discrepancies between MscL constructs used in these studies, most notably unintended heterogeneous expression...
The mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL) from Escherichia coli is a prototype for the mechanosensitive class of ion channels and opens one of the largest known gated transmembrane pores. As such, MscL offers the structural framework for the development of liposomal nanovalves for biotechnological applications. Here we incorporated M...
Light harvesting complex (LHC) proteins are among the most abundant proteins on Earth and play critical roles in photosynthesis, both in light capture and photoprotective mechanisms. The Chlamydomonas reinhardtii nucleic acid-binding protein 1 (NAB1) is a negative regulator of LHC protein translation. Its N-terminal cold shock domain (CSD) binds to...
An advanced understanding of the genetics of microalgae and the availability of molecular biology tools are both critical to the development of advanced strains, which offer efficiency advantages for primary production, and more specifically in the context of production for biocrude and renewable energy. Consequently, we outline the current state o...
Background
Microalgae provide an excellent platform for the production of high-value-products and are increasingly being recognised as a promising production system for biomass, animal feeds and renewable fuels.
Results
Here, we describe an automated screen, to enable high-throughput optimisation of 12 nutrients for microalgae production. Its mini...
Background: Microalgae provide an excellent platform for the production of high-value-products and are increas- ingly being recognised as a promising production system for biomass, animal feeds and renewable fuels.
Results: Here, we describe an automated screen, to enable high-throughput optimisation of 12 nutrients for micro- algae production. Its...
Main conclusion
A 44-base-pair region in the
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii LHCBM9
promoter is essential for sulphur responsiveness.
The photosynthetic light-harvesting complex (LHC) proteins play essential roles both in light capture, the first step of photosynthesis, and in photoprotective mechanisms. In contrast to the other LHC proteins and the ma...
The use of microalgae as a production system has gained huge interest in recent years. Recent research has concentrated on single aspects, such as the microalgal cells or the photobioreactors. The design of sustainable, effective and economic processes for microalgal products requires the integration of microalgal biology including strain selection...
Dry weight biomass is an important parameter in algaculture. Direct measurement requires weighing milligram quantities of dried biomass, which is problematic for small volume systems containing few cells, such as laboratory studies and high throughput assays in microwell plates. In these cases indirect methods must be used, inducing measurement art...
Photosynthetic organisms developed multiple strategies for balancing light-harvesting versus intracellular energy utilization to survive ever-changing environmental conditions. The light-harvesting complex (LHC) protein family is of paramount importance for this function and can form light-harvesting pigment protein complexes. In this work, we desc...
With a rising world population, demand will increase for food, energy and high value products. Renewable production systems, including photosynthetic microalgal biotechnologies, can produce biomass for foods, fuels and chemical feedstocks and in parallel allow the production of high value protein products, including recombinant proteins. Such high...
The maintenance of traditional microalgae collections based on liquid and solid media is labour intensive, costly and subject to contamination and genetic drift. Cryopreservation is therefore the method of choice for the maintenance of microalgae culture collections, but success is limited for many species. Although the mechanisms underlying cryopr...
Reducing CO2 emissions is imperative to stay within the 2 degree global warming 'safe limit' but these reductions must be aligned with fuel security and economic growth. Here an advanced multifactorial model (Eq.1) is used to forecast global energy demand, based on global population (UN), current energy use (International Energy Agency and BP) and...
Significance:
Sensations of touch and hearing are manifestations of mechanical contact and air pressure acting on touch receptors and hair cells of the inner ear, respectively. In bacteria, osmotic pressure exerts a significant mechanical force on their cellular membrane. Bacteria have evolved mechanosensitive (MS) channels to cope with excessive...
Technoeconomic analysis of renewable aviatin fuels has not been widely considered, despite the increasing global attention that the field has received. We present three process models for production of aviation fuel from microalgae, Pongamia pinnata, and sugarcane molasses. The models and assumptions have been deposited on a wiki (http://qsafi.aibn...
Single cell green algae (microalgae) are rapidly emerging as a platform for the production of sustainable fuels. Solar-driven H2 production from H2O theoretically provides the highest-efficiency route to fuel production in microalgae. This is because the H2-producing hydrogenase (HYDA) is directly coupled to the photosynthetic electron transport ch...
Initial RNAi oligo-nucleotides used during construction of RNAi vectors.
(DOC)
Absolute expression data derived during qRT-PCR experiments.
(DOC)
Herein we examine the potential role that microalgae might play in the approaching challenges of energy and fuel security, and food and water supply. Microalgal production systems remain the subject of controversy however, generally consisting of arguments about the economic and environment sustainability of these systems. We discuss these aspects...
A graphical abstract is available for this content
Here we examine the scale of petroleum consumption and the current lack of scalable petroleum alternatives. We highlight the contribution that macroalgae and microalgae can collectively make as feedstocks in the future energy mix, discuss recent advancements and current development pathways, and consider the potential and the limitations of these p...
Resource limitation is an escalating concern given human expansion and development. Algae are increasingly recognised as a promising bioresource and the range of cultivated species and their products is expanding. Compared to terrestrial crops, microalgae are very biodiverse and offer considerable versatility for a range of biotechnological applica...
Microalgal biotechnology has been commercially viable for several decades, but only for a restricted range of applications (Benemann et al. 1987). Owing to the relatively high capital cost of microalgal production systems, successful applications have generally focussed either upon niche areas in which both modern agriculture and microbial fermenta...
