UC San Diego

The world faces global warming, high cost of therapeutic proteins and natural products, serious pollution in developing countries, and potentially energy crisis in next 100 years. One potential solutions to solve the above problems is to discover useful genetic elements and enzymes from novel abundant microorganisms in nature, build a specific cell factory and perform state-of-art bioprogramming. However, it’s time-consuming to discover and identify these useful molecular elements from these less-studied organisms.Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a unicellular photosynthetic microalgae, which exhibit unique benefits to address global warming, climate change, development of renewable energy, and reduce costs of therapeutic proteins. Here we tried a preliminary pipeline to show how we could quickly discover transcription factor (TF) interaction mechanism, model metabolic flux and protein secretion, and engineer the genome of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Such a pipeline will help us understand the fundamental regulation of photosynthetic cell, and enable us to build a reliable whole cell model, which will be used for bioprogramming of algae to make many natural products.