In a newly published research, members of the Baliga and Price labs share discoveries from their studies of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii – Chlamy for short. Excerpt: To the casual observer, algae may appear to be a nuisance. But for researchers, photosynthetic microalgae and other microbes have the potential to become sustainable biofactories that can economically produce renewable biofuels and a wide variety of other valuable commodities. One such group of microalgae…
3 Bullets: When an organism duplicates its genes, it increases its ability to adapt and colonize new environments. ISB researchers used the systems approach to study how one family of microbial genes evolved to bring functions that were adaptive to specific environments. This new understanding of how gene regulatory networks rewire themselves has many potential applications, including how to wire new functions into an organism for biofuel production, bio-remediation or…
On Nov. 1, ISB and San Diego-based Sapphire Energy announced a strategic partnership to apply systems biology to algae with the goal of significantly increasing oil yield and improving resistance to crop predators and environmental factors in order to further the advancement of commercialized algae biofuel production. “Together, we have complementary expertise that will allow us to understand, reverse engineer and rationally alter the gene networks for fuel production in…
