St. Louis researchers launch algae research

checkbiotech.org
Friday, June 26, 2009
By Susanne Retka Schill

Researchers at two centers in St. Louis are gearing up to launch five-year research programs on algae, backed by U.S. DOE grants. The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center received $15 million and Washington University $20 million from the DOE’s fund for Energy Frontier Research Centers. A total of 46 centers were funded from a pool of some 260 applications.

Danforth’s Center for Advanced Biofuels Systems will be led by Richard Sayre, who also serves as director of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels. Sayre said the new team of researchers will be studying the conversion of energy captured from photosynthesis in the single cell algae and how it is channeled into oil. With algae oil production ranging from 5 percent to 70 percent lipids, the researchers will be working to identify ways to increase oil production. “We’ll take apart the system step by step and develop mechanisms to work around the bottlenecks,” he explained. The researchers hope to identify catalysts and enzymes that could be engineered into the organism to improve oil yields.

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