High quality algae culturing is the foundation of algae-based diesel industry. The costs of algae culturing take up about 40% of the total in algae-based diesel production. During the past few years, many scientific researches have been conducted on improving the oil productivity and growth rate of algae in China.
In early January 2011, an algae-breeding research project was reported to gain a strain of high oil-production algae through ultraviolet mutation method by Shandong Academy of Sciences. The achievement was verified and considered to reach the international advanced level by Department of Science &Technology of Shandong Province. However, the research achievements were gained under the optimized experiment conditions, the performances could be not so well in the actual production. In fact, now lots of algae strains from the breeding work are not qualified for industrialization.
Generally speaking, a qualified oil-producing algae strain for industrialization needs to be superior in three aspects at least, namely growth rate, oil contents and resistance to poor environmental conditions. However, till now, algae strains combined with these three advantages have not been found yet in the nature.
Actually from 1978 to 1996, the Aquatic Species Program (or ASP), funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fuels Development, had screened out about 300 algae strains with at least one advantage mentioned above out of over 3,000 strains potential for industrialization. But none of them were proved desirable finally. What's worse, some beneficial traits were found to be mutually exclusive to each other in one strain. For example, a high oil-production algae strain can not grow fast at the same time. Furthermore, owing that all the traits have very complicated relationships with each other, genetic modifications on single one or two traits can not create an all-purpose algae strain.
Till now, there has been no commercialization of transgenic oil-producing algae reported globally. And in fact there have been no researches on genetic modification of oil-producing algae yet in China, according to Professor Xu, director of Bioenergy Genome Center (BEGC) of Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology affiliated to Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS-QIBEBT).
Aiming to create a desired algae strain, Professor Xu suggested that all the genes which relate to the key traits (like high oil-production, high growth rate) should be sorted out beforehand and then the whole gene network should be figured out before the genetic modification. Only when these jobs are completed beforehand can effectively devise the needed algae strain. Professor Xu also disclosed that CAS-QIBEBT had started these jobs since 2011. But he was uncertain when these jobs could be finished.
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