News reports about biofuels sometimes mention used cooking oil as a raw material, but if these substances contain animal fat, they can solidify at colder temperatures. This happens because the fatty acids of these and many other saturated fats chemically have long carbon chains with single bonds. Enter the euglena. A team from Osaka Metropolitan University has found a way to get one species of this microalgae to produce wax esters with shorter carbon chains than normal.
Using CRISPR/Cas9 to edit the genome Euglena gracilisDr. Masami Nakazawa and her team from the Graduate School of Agriculture’s Department of Applied Biochemistry produced stable mutants that created wax esters that were two carbon atoms shorter than the wild-type strain.
This improvement in the cold flow of the wax esters makes them more suitable as a raw material for biofuels. Among the factors favorable to its use Euglena gracilis as a source of biofuel is its ability to grow easily through photosynthesis and anaerobic production of wax esters.
“This achievement is expected to serve as a foundational technology for replacing some of the petroleum-based wax ester production with biological sources,” confirmed Dr. Nakazawa.
