Heavy reliance on fossil fuels has been associated with increased climate disasters. As an alternative, microalgae have been proposed as an effective agent for biomass production. Several advantages of microalgae include faster growth, usage of non-arable land, recovery of nutrients from wastewater, efficient CO 2 capture, and high amount of biomolecules that are valuable for humans. Microalgae Chlorella spp. are a large group of eukaryotic, photosynthetic, unicellular microorganisms with high adaptability to environmental variations. Over the past decades, Chlorella has been used for the large-scale production of biomass. In addition, Chlorella has been actively used in various food industries for improving human health because of its antioxidant, antidiabetic, and immunomodulatory functions. However, the major restrictions in microalgal biofuel technology are the cost-consuming cultivation, processing, and lipid extraction processes. Therefore, various trials have been performed to enhance the biomass productivity and the lipid contents of Chlorella cells. This study provides a comprehensive review of lipid enhancement strategies mainly published in the last five years and aimed at regulating carbon sources, nutrients, stresses, and expression of exogenous genes to improve biomass production and lipid synthesis.
Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress is caused by the stress-induced accumulation of unfolded proteins in the ER. Several compounds are used to induce the unfolded protein response (UPR) in animals, with different modes of action, but which ER stress-inducing drugs induce ER stress in microalgae or land plants is unclear. In this study, we examined the effects of seven chemicals that were reported to induce ER stress in animals on the growth, UPR gene expression, and fatty acid profiles of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Arabidopsis thaliana: 2-deoxyglucose (2-DG), dithiothreitol (DTT), tunicamycin (TM), thapsigargin (TG), brefeldin A (BFA), monensin (MON), and eeyarestatin I (EEY). In both model photosynthetic organisms, DTT, TM, BFA, and MON treatment induced ER stress, as indicated by the induction of spliced bZIP1 and bZIP60, respectively. In Chlamydomonas, DTT, TM, and BFA treatment induced the production of transcripts related to lipid biosynthesis, but MON treatment did not. In Arabidopsis, DTT, TM, BFA, and MON inhibited seed germination and seedling growth with the activation of bZIP60. These findings lay the foundation for using four types of ER stress-inducing drugs in photosynthetic organisms, and they help uncover the mode of action of each compound. (192)
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