Topic: Enhancing the Lipid Synthesis in Microalgal Chlamydomonas and Converting its Biomass Residue into High Efficient Heavy Metal Biosorbent

Reporter: He Shixi, professor from the School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology

Time: 14.00 p.m., Nov. 24, 2017

Venue: Room 604, Engineering Building

About the Report

It has been reported that reducing starch biosynthesisor reinforcing lipid biosynthesis can enhance lipid accumulation, but the metabolic mechanism controlling carbon partitioning from starch to lipids in microalgae remains unclear, thus complicating the genetic engineering of algal strains that can overproduce lipids while maintaining high growth rates. We here use dynamic metabolic profiling and essential transcription analysis to clearly demonstrate the dynamic switching mechanisms from starch to lipid synthesis and identify the metabolic rate-limiting step for enhancing lipid accumulation. These results will help increase our understanding of dynamic carbon partitioning in oleaginous microalgae. Moreover, our demonstration of several key lipid-synthesis-related genes and starch-degradation related genes could provide a breakthrough in making feasible the marine microalgal production of biodiesel. Because the conventional methods for lipid/starch determination and quantification are not only destructive and tedious, but also energy-consuming and environment-unfriendly, we here first demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy is a clean, fast and accurate method to simultaneously quantify the lipid / carbohydrate content and ratio in living microalgal cells. It has been reported that zero valent iron can help biochar improve efficiency in heavy metal (HM) absorption, but the surface chemical behaviors and HM removal mechanisms remain unclear. We successfully synthesized the magnetic nanoscale zero valent iron assisted biochar (nZVI-BC) which is derived from the waste biomass. The results show that the surface chemical behaviors of nZVI-BC would help increase our understanding of the HM removal mechanisms. Moreover, our demonstration of the superior removal ability of multiple HM (Pb2 , Cd2 , Cr6 , Cu2 , Ni2 ,Zn2 ) from a solution can provide a breakthrough in making a feasible material for removing HM from polluted water resources.

About the Reporter

He Shixin, professor of the School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, is listed into the Thousands of Young Experts by the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the CPC. His research focuses on microbial carbon sequestration and biomass energy, urban water treatment and water reuse, waste recycling and high value oriented transformation. For many years, he has been engaged in the study of bioenergy, environmental science and engineering. More than 70 SCI indexed papers were published in many well-known international SCI journals such as Biotechnol. Adv., Biotechnol. Biofuels, Sci. Rep., ACS Appl. Mat. Inter. ACS Sus., Chem. Eng., and Bioresour. Technol. etc. including 3 papers with IF>10.0 and 50 papers with IF>5.0.The total impact factors of the SCI papers are more than 370, the highest impact factor is 10.6, and the average impact factor is 5.1. At present, 5 SCI papers have been cited more than 100 times, and four of them are the top 1% cited papers. In 2015, he was selected to be sponsored by the Young Top Talent Program of Harbin Institute of Technology, and the Thousands of Young Experts Program of the Organization Department of the Central Committee in 2016, and was granted the title of Chair Professor of Minjiang Scholar of Fujian Province in 2017.

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