Mankind has recognized the value of land plants as renewable sources of food, medicine, and materials for millennia. Throughout human history, agricultural methods were continuously modified and improved to meet the changing needs of civilization. Today, our rapidly growing population requires further innovation to address the practical limitations and serious environmental concerns associated with current industrial and agricultural practices. Microalgae are a diverse group of unicellular photosynthetic organisms that are emerging as next-generation resources with the potential to address urgent industrial and agricultural demands. The extensive biological diversity of algae can be leveraged to produce a wealth of valuable bioproducts, either naturally or via genetic manipulation. Microalgae additionally possess a set of intrinsic advantages, such as low production costs, no requirement for arable land, and the capacity to grow rapidly in both large-scale outdoor systems and scalable, fully contained photobioreactors. Here, we review technical advancements, novel fields of application, and products in the field of algal biotechnology to illustrate how algae could present high-tech, low-cost, and environmentally friendly solutions to many current and future needs of our society. We discuss how emerging technologies such as synthetic biology, high-throughput phenomics, and the application of internet of things (IoT) automation to algal manufacturing technology can advance the understanding of algal biology and, ultimately, drive the establishment of an algal-based bioeconomy.

In spite of attractive attributes, diatoms are underrepresented in research and literature related to the development of microalgal biofuels. Diatoms are highly diverse and have substantial evoluti...

A major challenge in the development of microalgal strains for large-scale production is the optimization of biomass accumulation and production of fuel-relevant molecules such as triacylglycerol. Selecting targets for genetic manipulation approaches will require a fundamental understanding of the organization and regulation of carbon metabolic pathways in these organisms. Functional genomic and metabolomics data is becoming easier to obtain and process, however interpreting the significance of these data in a physiological context is challenging since the metabolic framework of all microalgae remains poorly understood. Owing to a complex evolutionary history, diatoms differ substantially from many other photosynthetic organisms in their intracellular compartmentation and the organization of their carbon partitioning pathways. A comparative analysis of the genes involved in carbon partitioning metabolism from Thalassiosira pseudonana, Phaeodactylum tricornutum, and Fragilariopsis cylindrus revealed that diatoms have conserved the lower half of glycolysis in the mitochondria, the upper half of glycolysis (including key regulatory enzymes) in the cytosol, and several mitochondrial carbon partitioning enzymes. However, some substantial differences exist between the three diatoms investigated, including the translocation of metabolic pathways to different compartments, selective maintenance and horizontal acquisition of genes, and differential gene family expansions. A key finding is that metabolite transport between intracellular compartments is likely to play a substantial role in the regulation of carbon flux. Analysis of the carbon partitioning components in the mitochondria suggests an important role of this organelle as a carbon flux regulator in diatoms. Differences between the analyzed species are specific examples of how diatoms may have modified their carbon partitioning pathways to adapt to environmental niches during the diversification of the group. This comparative analysis highlights how even core central pathways can be modified considerably within a single algal group, and enables the identification of suitable targets for genetic engineering to enhance biofuel precursor production