Chapter category: Biotechnology
Nuclear Transformation of Eukaryotic Microalgae: Historical Overview, Achievements and Problems
Transgenic Microalgae as Green
Cell Factories
Edited by: Rosa León, Aurora Gaván and Emilio FernándezISBN: 978-0-387-75531-1
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Chapter authors:
Rosa León and Emilio Fernández
Transformation of microalgae is a first step in their use for biotechnological applications involving foreign protein production or molecular modifications of specific cell metabolic pathways. Since the first reliable achievements of nuclear transformation in Chlamydomonas, other eukaryotic microalgae have become transformed with molecular markers that allow a direct selection. Different methods—glass beads, electroporation, particle bombardment, or Agrobacterium—and constructions have been set up in several organisms and successfully used. However, some problems associated with efficiency, integration, or stability of the transgenes still persist and are analysed herein. Though the number of microalgae species successfully transformed is not very high, prospects for transformation of many more are good enough on the basis of what has been achieved so far.
Rosa León
Deparamento de Química y Ciencia de Materiales, Facultad de Ciencias Experimentales, Universidad de Huelva,
Emilio Fernández
Departamento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Córdoba
Additional chapters from this book:
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Diatoms are unicellular photoautotrophic eukaryotes that play an important role in ecology by fixing large amounts of CO2 in the oceans. Because they evolved by secondary endocytobiosis—a process of...
Nuclear Transformation of Eukaryotic Microalgae: Historical Overview, Achievements and Problems
Rosa León and Emilio Fernández
Transformation of microalgae is a first step in their use for biotechnological applications involving foreign protein production or molecular modifications of specific cell metabolic pathways. Since t...
Insertional Mutagenesis as a Tool to Study Genes/Functions in Chlamydomonas
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The unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii has emerged during the last decades as a model system to understand gene functions, many of them shared by bacteria, fungi, plants, animals and humans. A...
