题目：MICROALGAL BIOTECHNOLOGY: SCIENCE AND ITS APPLICATIONS

报告人：Professor Steven Feng Chen
               School of Biological Sciences, The University of Hong Kong
时间：5月11日13：00-14：00
地点：方正大厦301会议室
 
报告摘要：
Microalgae are a huge family of microorganisms comprising over 50,000 species in habitats almost everywhere on earth, and constitute a large resource of genetic and metabolic diversity which has been largely untapped for products of commercial interest.  In recent years, microalgae have been found to contain large quantities of high-value products, including chemicals, pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, and there is renewed interest in microalgae as a source of biofuels due to their ability to accumulate large amounts of lipids (up to 77% on a dry weight basis) within the algal cells. As a result, much attention has been attracted to effective mass cultivation of microalgae for commercial applications, leading to the emergence of an exciting research area called ‘microalgal biotechnology’. One important aspect of microalgal biotechnology is to develop functional foods and nutraceuticals from microalgae either by taking the whole cells (e.g., Chlorella, Spirulina, etc.) or by extracting functional ingredients such as β-carotene, astaxanthin, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosapentaenoic acid (DPA) and phycocyanin, etc. from the algal cells, both relying largely on the attainability of algal biomass. Consequently the development of a cost-effective process for the large-scale production of microalgal biomass is of vital importance. Conventionally microalgae are considered photosynthetic organisms requiring carbon dioxide as carbon source and sunlight as energy source. While the method based on photosynthesis has been practiced for many decades, the yield possibly obtained therefrom in many cases, however, is meager, which greatly hinders the application of microalgae. Such a bottleneck, nevertheless, can be solved by developing a heterotrophic process taking advantage of the properties of certain algae being able to grow rapidly on organic carbon-containing substrates in the dark. In this talk, based on my many years experience in the field, the development of a high-cell density process for microalgal mass culture coupled with the novel separation and purification technique as well as the use of metabolic engineering to produce functional foods and nutraceuticals by microalgae or by transgenic plant containing a unique microalgal gene, together with their theoretical basis, will be presented. The possibility of growing microalgae photosynthetically or mixotrophically in order to produce biofuels will also be explored and discussed.