Doe aquatic species program report

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Name of resource. Problem URL. Describe the connection issue. Toggle navigation Back to results. A look back at the U. From to , the U. Department of Energy's Office of Fuels Development funded a program to develop renewable transportation fuels from algae. The main focus of the program, know as the Aquatic Species Program or ASP was the production of biodiesel from high lipid-content algae grown in ponds, utilizing waste CO2 from coal fired power plants.

Over the almost two decades of this program, tremendous advances were made in the science of manipulating the metabolism of algae and the engineering of microalgae algae production systems.

Technical highlights of the program are summarized below:. The ASP studied a fairly specific aspect of algae—their ability to produce natural oils. Researchers not only concerned themselves with finding algae that produced a lot of oil, but also with algae that grow under severe conditions—extremes of temperature, pH and salinity. At the outset of the program, no collections existed that either emphasized or characterized algae in terms of these constraints.

Early on, researchers set out to build such a collection. Algae were collected from sites in the west, the northwest and the southeastern regions of the continental U. At its peak, the collection contained over 3, strains of organisms. After screening, isolation and characterization efforts, the collection was eventually winnowed down to around species, mostly green algae and diatoms. The collection, now housed at the University of Hawaii, is still available to researchers. This collection is an untapped resource, both in terms of the unique organisms available and the mostly untapped genetic resource they represent.

It is our sincere hope that future researchers will make use of the collection not only as a source of new products for energy production, but for many as yet undiscovered new products and genes for industry and medicine. Prior to this program, little work had been done to improve oil production in algal organisms. Much of the program's research focused attention on the elusive "lipid trigger. This "trigger" refers to the observation that, under environmental stress, many microalgae appeared to flip a switch to turn on production of TAGs.

Nutrient deficiency was the major factor studied. Our work with nitrogen-deficiency in algae and silicon deficiency in diatoms did not turn up any overwhelming evidence in support of this trigger theory. The common thread among the studies showing increased oil production under stress seems to be the observed cessation of cell division.