Visualizing biofuel feedstock production in algae and fungi with mesoscale bioimaging and environmental perturbation

Concern over the long-term availability of fossil fuels has increased demand for renewable biofuels. However, the widespread adoption of biofuels relies on continued improvement of its cost competitiveness when compared to diesel and gasoline. Algal-based biofuels hold much promise due to their high photosynthetic efficiency and their ability to fix carbon as energy rich lipids with downstream processing methods for direct conversion to biodiesel. While several industrial applications already exist for renewable biofuel production with algae, many questions still remain related to a lack of detailed understanding of the various lipid metabolic pathways and the precise factors which regulate the expression levels of the many enzymatic components. While traditional biochemical techniques are being used to investigate these pathways, multimodal and correlative electron, ion, optical and x-ray imaging combined with microfluidic devices that allow experimental control over the local environment provides a unique opportunity to study lipid metabolism from a structural perspective at the single cell level. Integrating such chemical imaging with corresponding ‘omics analysis can empower holistic understanding of the underlying mechanisms employed by algae and identify traits that can be harnessed and controlled to yield fully optimized strains to improve the cost competitiveness of biodiesel. In this talk I will highlight preliminary chemical imaging work toward understanding triacylglycerol accumulation in one of the most ancient green algae along with describing new technologies being developed to enable such imaging for a wide array of microbes.