Algae Biofuels and Genomics - Where do we stand?

This week, I'm in California for the Joint Genome Institute's (JGI) Annual User's Meeting. The theme of this year is "Genomics of Energy & Environment", and there are a lot of talks in the next few days aimed at how people are using genome sequencing and bioinformatics for biofuels research.

In the algae world, we know some groups such as Saphire Energy are working to genetically engineer algal strains. People have also been working for years to try to engineer more hydrogen production from green algae, and we just learned of a group successfully genetically engineer algae to make proteins for the pharmaceutical industry.

In order to understand how to genetically engineer an organism, we need to have model genetic and genomic systems to learn from and experiment with. For a long time, very few things considered algae had a genome sequence. You hear a lot about the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardii, because it was the first to have it's genome sequenced. In the past 10 years, only a handful of microbes that fall into the category algae have had a whole genome sequenced, including two diatoms and one of their relatives, a red alga, a coccolithophore, and two other marine green alage. Compare that to at least twice as many plant genomes and over one thousand bacterial genomes.

In my academic work, I use genomes and comparative genomics to study the evolution of algal groups and their physiological capabilities. I also use a new tool, called metagenomics, to look at the combined genome of these organisms in the environment - specifically the ocean. To do this, we go collect community samples of microbes in the ocean, extract total DNA (or RNA) from those samples and then sequence as much as we can from it. Then we identify who was there by comparing to the genomes we have already sequenced. As you might guess, this is a really hard problem when you have only a handful of genomes to compare to.

This limited genomic data also poses challenges for the algae biofuels industry. Many of the scientist doing this work would love to have genome sequence of the potential fuel producing strains. Two weeks ago, a group in Texas announced the genome project of a biofuel favorite, Botryococcus braunii.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100312164659.htm

This will be a contribution to the industry but also to academia, where scientist looking to understand the evolution and physiology of these organism will also be able to make use of the data. B. braunii is just the beginning of sequencing for energy related organisms, that will also help to fill out our understanding of the tree of life.

(I should say that the genomes I mentioned above are the ones that are publicly available. Many labs are in the process of sequencing genomes that are not publicly available yet, and genome sequencing done through industry probably will not be shared... but we can hope.)