TY - JOUR
T1 - Engineering microalgae for water phosphorus recovery to close the phosphorus cycle
AU - Wang, Long
AU - Jia, Xianqing
AU - Xu, Lei
AU - Yu, Jiahong
AU - Ren, Suna
AU - Yang, Yujie
AU - Wang, Kaibin
AU - López-Arredondo, Damar
AU - Herrera-Estrella, Luis
AU - Lambers, Hans
AU - Yi, Keke
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors. Plant Biotechnology Journal published by Society for Experimental Biology and The Association of Applied Biologists and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2023/7
Y1 - 2023/7
N2 - As a finite and non-renewable resource, phosphorus (P) is essential to all life and crucial for crop growth and food production. The boosted agricultural use and associated loss of P to the aquatic environment are increasing environmental pollution, harming ecosystems, and threatening future global food security. Thus, recovering and reusing P from water bodies is urgently needed to close the P cycle. As a natural, eco-friendly, and sustainable reclamation strategy, microalgae-based biological P recovery is considered a promising solution. However, the low P-accumulation capacity and P-removal efficiency of algal bioreactors restrict its application. Herein, it is demonstrated that manipulating genes involved in cellular P accumulation and signalling could triple the Chlamydomonas P-storage capacity to ~7% of dry biomass, which is the highest P concentration in plants to date. Furthermore, the engineered algae could recover P from wastewater almost three times faster than the unengineered one, which could be directly used as a P fertilizer. Thus, engineering genes involved in cellular P accumulation and signalling in microalgae could be a promising strategy to enhance P uptake and accumulation, which have the potential to accelerate the application of algae for P recovery from the water body and closing the P cycle.
AB - As a finite and non-renewable resource, phosphorus (P) is essential to all life and crucial for crop growth and food production. The boosted agricultural use and associated loss of P to the aquatic environment are increasing environmental pollution, harming ecosystems, and threatening future global food security. Thus, recovering and reusing P from water bodies is urgently needed to close the P cycle. As a natural, eco-friendly, and sustainable reclamation strategy, microalgae-based biological P recovery is considered a promising solution. However, the low P-accumulation capacity and P-removal efficiency of algal bioreactors restrict its application. Herein, it is demonstrated that manipulating genes involved in cellular P accumulation and signalling could triple the Chlamydomonas P-storage capacity to ~7% of dry biomass, which is the highest P concentration in plants to date. Furthermore, the engineered algae could recover P from wastewater almost three times faster than the unengineered one, which could be directly used as a P fertilizer. Thus, engineering genes involved in cellular P accumulation and signalling in microalgae could be a promising strategy to enhance P uptake and accumulation, which have the potential to accelerate the application of algae for P recovery from the water body and closing the P cycle.
KW - algal fertilizer
KW - genetic engineering
KW - microalgae
KW - phosphorus recovery
KW - phosphorus removal
KW - wastewater treatment
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85150183707&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/pbi.14040
DO - 10.1111/pbi.14040
M3 - Article
C2 - 36920783
AN - SCOPUS:85150183707
SN - 1467-7644
VL - 21
SP - 1373
EP - 1382
JO - Plant Biotechnology Journal
JF - Plant Biotechnology Journal
IS - 7
ER -