| dc.description.abstract | Concerns about petroleum supplies, high energy cost, and environmental pollutions are driving scientists to find renewable biofuels such as bioethanol, biodiesel, and biogas. Recently, more attention has been focused on the application of genetically engineered algae in the massive production of biodiesels. Photosynthetic microorganisms, such as microalgae and cyanobacteria, are excellent organisms for biofuel production. Their genomes are relatively small and therefore are easy to manipulate. They are efficient at converting solar energy and recycling CO2 into fuels. In particular, unlike many energy crops, they can be grown on non-arable land. One down side in using microalgae as bioenergy resources is that, an energy-consuming step is required to break down the cell wall of microalgae to extract the intracellular lipids, which would inevitably increase the cost and time of producing biodiesel. We have selected Cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 as a model organism to develop methods for easy recovery of lipids for biofuel production. Our strategy is to construct an efficient fatty acid secretion system using the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC6803 as the platform. The targets of interest include fatty acid carrier proteins, channel proteins or transporters The secreted fatty acids can then be filtered or absorbed by filters. This strategy can not only reduce the time and cost of making biodiesel by skipping the breaking-down step, but also aid in the development of a consolidated bioprocess. Hence, this project does not aim to increase the intracellular lipid content of the microalgae, but instead to facilitate the secretion of fatty acids to the medium and consequently to establish a consolidated bioprocess for biodiesel production. FFA secretion was observed and determined by GC, our data have shown that introducing extra Arabidopsis thaliana Temperature-induced-lipocalin (AtTIL) and Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 Lipid-transfer proteins (SpLTP) into Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 have more secretion efficiency. | en_US |