(Courtesy of Bradley Moore)
Seaweed represent a 6 billion dollar industry across the world, and are a source of many materials spanning the chemical and food sectors. Understanding how seaweeds construct these molecules will allow us to harness their biosynthetic machinery in the biomanufacturing of fuels, lubricants, polymers, and other commodity and specialty chemicals. To help us understand the rich biochemistry of seaweeds, we will sequence the genomes of 10 seaweeds that are biosynthetically “gifted.” The resulting genomes will also provide new insight into how seaweed adapt to diverse and inhospitable environments.
Proposer: Bradley Moore, University of California, San Diego
Proposal: Exploring algal biodiversity for the production of chemical feedstocks and other biotechnological applications