Algae Project
Unicellular algal species have gained considerable importance in recent times due to their fast growth rate and ability to be grown in varied places like open ponds and bioreactors. Algal species have been proven to be efficient biological factories a produce a wide range of commercial products. This is a big advantage over land plants where the availability of land for growing a large number of plants is always a problem. Algal species have already proven to be naturally rich in nutraceuticals like eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). They are also known to produce lipids which can be converted to biodiesel fuels.
Besides algal species’ natural ability to produce a variety of products that are commercially important, they also have been bioengineered to produce large quantities and more varieties of commercial products. A large number of algal species like Chlorella vulgaris, Botryococcus braunii, Spirulina platensis and many others are known to be commercially important.
Galdieria sulphuraria is especially an interesting species as it can survive on many different types of media and in many environmental conditions. It is known to grow even in harsh conditions when there is an increased concentration of heavy toxic metals like mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc. These types of adaptations can take place when genetic elements are transferred from other organisms known to survive in hostile conditions. The project focuses mainly on the horizontal gene transfer in algal species like G. sulphuraria. Horizontal gene transfer is the transfer of genetic elements from one organism to another. These transferred genes are also called “alien” genes.
The “alien” genes are detected by using bioinformatics and molecular biology based approaches. Entropy based segmentation and agglomerative clustering will be used to detect horizontally transferred genes from bacteria and Achaea to various algal species. Natural transformation processes, uptake of DNA, which can take place for surviving nutrient deficiencies or for repair of DNA at various instances, will be used in order to introduce foreign genes in algae.
The final goal of the project is to understand the events of horizontal gene transfer and apply the same to bioengineer various algal species for harnessing them at commercial levels.
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