Optimizing Lipid Production by Planktonic Algae - LIPIDO (N-INNER)

The UiO part of the LIPIDO project will contribute to the main objectives of the project mainly through sub-goals 1 and 2: " Screening the most promising algal species for temperate environments " Optimizing their growth and lipid yield as functions of gr owth conditions As such, this will contribute to testing a main hypothesis of the LIPIDO project: 1) Cold-water planktonic algae represent optimal organisms for fuel-oriented biomass production in temperate areas, in terms of biomass yield, lipid yield, and suitability for stable mass cultivation with low energy input Our special focus will be on coldwater planktonic diatom and dinoflagellate species common in the Baltic Sea, which on the basis of current knowledge incorporate high fractions of CO2 upta ke into lipids and possess high growth rates down to 0 °C. We have a number of these species isolated in cultures during previous and ongoing research, and further isolations will be done during the first stages of the project. Related freshwater species will be isolated, and on the basis of literature, reference species from a sufficiently wide taxonomical range will be isolated from nature or obtained from international algal collections. The array of phytoplankton species thus obtained will be grown under a basic set of culturing conditions (gradients of temperature, light and nutrient supply) and assayed for total lipid contents by the SYKE group of the project. We will use custom-made miniaturized incubators designed for high-throughput screening o f light and temperature effects on microalgal growth rate and lipid yield. The incubators will utilize state of the art techonologies like thermoelectric (Peltier) elements, white LEDs, and microplate readers. After the responses of target species to gr adients of basic environmental parameters are assayed, yield comparisons under species specific optimal environmental conditions are carried out in batch and continuous modes of cultivation. The best cultivation modes for most promising species will then be tested under a set of different volume scales.