Research Project Outline
Algae generally do not have organs to accumulate storage compounds such as lipids and carbohydrates. They rather accumulate these storage compounds specifically when suffering from some stress such as nutrient starvation. We recently found that plant vegetative organs including leaves and roots also accumulate these storage lipids under nutrient shortage conditions. In this project, we strategically construct systems to produce very large amount of lipids in algal cells utilizing plant vegetative organs as a model. To perform this, we will primarily establish a research platform for several useful algae, which covers overall information of genome, transcriptome and lipid metabolome, and subsequently construct algal systems to accumulate large amount of lipids useful for chemical materials and biofuels.