Hi, I'm Stephen Mayfield, Professor of Biology at the University of California San Diego and Director of the California Center for Algae Biotechnology. Today I want to talk about algae as an industrial organism. And I've subtitled that, Photosynthetic bio-manufacturing. So what is Photosynthetic bio-manufacturing, what does that mean? Well, let's start with a pretty simple definition, which is what is bio-manufacturing? We can define that as the use of living systems or organisms to develop and make products, useful products. In this case, what I'm showing is a picture of fermentation tanks that are growing Chinese hamster ovary cells. That happens to be the mammalian cell that people engineered to express Monoclonal antibodies and in this case this is a picture of the Genentech facility up here in Oceanside, California. But you might also recognize those tanks as looking something like what you produce beer in. And again, producing beer is bio-manufacturing. In that case we're taking barley and yeast and we're using the yeast, a living organism, to manufacture a product that we want namely beer. So that's bio-manufacturing. Well, what is Photosynthetic bio-manufacturing? It's Agriculture. So, agriculture is also bio-manufacturing. We have modified living organisms to produce a product we want. In this case, I'm showing a picture in the upper left hand corner of wheat, and that was modified over centuries, selected over centuries so that we got wheat that was large size and the grain stayed on the stock, and many many different genetic modifications to it, so that it produced something useful for us. Well, and then and what I've also got shown up here, dairy cows and again those dairy cows have been selected to produce milk for an extended period of time and a lot of milk. So, those are organisms that we have selected to manufacture something that we want. Then what I have shown in the bottom corner is a picture of the Sapphire Energy site that grows algae for bio-fuels, and again the point of this slide is simply to show that algae is agriculture. Just to give you an orientation, that facility is about one mile long by about a third of a mile wide and I think you can see at this scale it's starting to look a lot like industrial agriculture. Okay, so that's bio-manufacturing and agriculture is manufacturing and we said it's Photosynthetic manufacturing. So, what is Photosynthetic bio-manufacturing? It's the use of Carbon dioxide and sunlight to create products. So, all plants and algae do the same process, which is sun plus CO2 in a plant equals product. And what we have is a little cartoon up there showing a strawberry. All of that occurs inside of a Chloroplast or if you happen to be Cyanobacteria, that occurs inside the cell. So, Photosynthesis takes place there and Photosynthesis can generally be broken down into two important reactions. The first reaction is the capture of sunlight, that takes place on the Thylakoid membranes on what's called Photosystem two and Photosystem one, so those are light absorbing complexes. They capture sunlight and that energy is used to split water and that produces protons and oxygen and then those protons are used to make ATP or reducing potential. Then that ATP, that energy in that reducing potential in something called the dark reactions, which takes place in the soluble portion of the Chloroplast, that fixes CO2. So, what does that mean? That means we take CO2, and then we add to it reducing potential and use some energy of that to make primary sugars, and those primary sugars are then used to produce carbohydrates and lipids and proteins. All right, so Photosynthesis, making a product is Photosynthetic bio-manufacturing. How important is this? Well, it's 100 percent of our food and 85 percent of the fuel that we consume every year are products of Photosynthesis. So, they are from Photosynthetic bio-manufacturing. Here this is a picture of corn and clearly you'll recognize that as Photosynthesis and the production of food. What a lot of people don't appreciate is that fuel, all of the fossil fuel that we burn today, so that's 85 percent of the energy that we consume on this planet, that also comes from the process of Photosynthesis. In this case, what I have shown here is simply a little cartoon showing that millions of years ago, actually hundreds of millions of years ago, algae in the ocean captured CO2 using sunlight energy, they produced carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids. They sank to the bottom of the sea, the proteins and the carbohydrates were consumed by microorganisms. The lipids that were left over over millions of years under high temperature and high pressure that became crude oil, that became fossil fuel. So, petroleum is simply fossil algae, and coal is fossil plants. So, both of those are simply fossilized Photosynthetic bio-manufacturing. So, what we're going to consider now going forward is how we do Photosynthetic bio-manufacturing in real time to make those same products. So, why algae? Well, algae are a new platform. Right now you'll recognize Photosynthetic bio-manufacturing is all the food we produce. That's primarily generated in terrestrial crops. Corn, wheat, rice, etc. But the little engine that drives that, which is Photosynthesis, that also goes on in algae and in the case of algae it actually goes on much more efficiently than it does in terrestrial crops. So, our inputs will be Carbon dioxide, sunlight, water, and a little bit of nutrients, fertilizer. Algae are the conversion engine and then what's going to come out on the other side is every product you can imagine. Those might be fuels, those might be animal food, those might be plastics, those might be pharmaceuticals. And we'll talk about all of those as this class goes on. So, there's also a relationship between the size of the product we want to make, not the physical size of the product but the volume of that product that is going to be consumed and the cost. And there's an inverse relationship to that. That means the larger the volume the lower the cost. Fuels are by far the largest commodity on this planet. We burn about 1.2 trillion gallons of petroleum every year. Trillion with a T. And that is an enormous volume but we also, we sell that at a very low cost. Even though we think of fuel being expensive, maybe when we go to the gas station, remember that three dollars a gallon is still only around 40 cents a pound. On the other end of the spectrum are very low volume, but very high cost products and in this case we happen to be showing a monoclonal antibody. So, those are therapeutic proteins, those can sell for millions of dollars per kilogram. But the volume of those is very small. And the bio-manufacturing is going to follow all parts of the spectrum. Just to show you some things that are today. So, this is not things that we're going to do in the future. In the case of algae, today it's at least a $12 billion market, perhaps as high as $14 or $15 billion market. Most of the products that we make out of algae today are high value, but low volume Nutraceuticals. So, including things like Spirulina and Chlorella. Spirulina is a Cyanobacteria, Chlorella is a green algae. We produce those and sell those as Nutraceuticals. You might recognize them if you go to the store in a Green Machine or some of the other health drinks that are sold. We also produce lots of pigments from these things. Astaxanthin is a bright red antioxidant put in many different things including foods and cosmetics, Beta Carotene another rich antioxidant and anti sync that's a rich in antioxidant. And then we also make by fermentation, but in an algae one of the really important omega 3 fatty acids, DHA, and that actually, that alone sells for about $400 million a year. So, these are products that are real. We're producing them now. And I think in the future you're going to see a lot more products coming online from algae, as we learn to engineer it, as we learn to grow it, as we learn all of the processes to domesticate algae to make it much more of an industrial organism.
