Recent concerning against global climate change facilitates the transition from fossil fuel-based economy to decarbonized and sustainable economy. Because plants and algae can produce a variety of organic compounds by using light energy and atmospheric carbon dioxide, development of these photosynthetic organisms is considered as one of the key strategies to realize carbon neutrality. In particular, several species of microalgae are capable of accumulating a large amount of lipid (i.e. up to 50-60% of dry cell weight), which make them as promising biological platforms. Moreover, microalgal production has several advantages in comparison to plant-based production, such as showing a higher yield with less land area and also freshwater usage. Despite these great potentials, commercialization of microalgal lipid has been limited, because the outdoor large-scale cultivation often fails to meet the productivity accomplished by the lab-scale cultivation owing to technical difficulties and various biotic and abiotic stresses affecting algal growth performance. To overcome this limitation, development of biotechnological tools that enables to manufacture the algal traits, and also information about genome, transcriptome, metabolome has been reported so far.
In our lab, we aim to elucidate the molecular mechanism of lipid metabolism and abiotic stress responses in microalgae, especially Nannochloropsis (marine microalga). Based on the collected insights, we would like to engineer and create robust and productive strain, which would contribute to establishment of decarbonized and circular economy.