Integrated Human Practises
To better understand the ins and outs of our project and improve it we contacted many experts specialized in algae research field, legislations and ethics. Indeed, as students we needed to learn more about the possible limits of our project, think of ways to overpass them and imagine how to make it be conformed with society, law and scientific community's expectations and requirements.
Interview
Hubert Bonnefond: holds a Phd in oceanography and is the co-founder of a start-up called “Inalve”. The goal of his work is to naturally select ultra-productive microalgae strain to sell flour for animal feeding.
Interview:
Mr. Bonnefond believes that, in addition to the fact that GMOs are forbidden or partially forbidden in France, French people also have a negative vision towards them. For these reasons, he insisted on the importance of the safety of our microalgae cultures, as serious environmental concern could arise if our microalgae was to be released in the sea.
What we learnt and how we used it:
Thanks to this interview, we conceived a safety system to prevent the release of our strain into the environment. In fact, we improved our photobioreactor design to ensure its closure and its sealing. We therefore moved forward from our initial photobioreactor 3D prototype Newcastle helped us to design (see collaboration).
Theodolinda Fabrizi:pHD student in water and environment law. She’s currently enrolled at the Doctoral School of International Law, European Law, International Relations and Comparative Law of the Panthéon-Assas University in Paris.
Interview:
During our interview with her, we talked about our project general feasibility, with for example the possibility to cultivate algae in sea water. She confirmed us that in legal term, it was impossible to free our modified microalgae in seawater, according to the law in effect in France. Indeed, the legislations that regulates the use of GMO are very strict in the European Union. She highlighted the fact that the use of GMOs have to be proven completely risk free for the environment to be accepted. However, when it comes to use of living material, there is always a risk no matter how small.
What we learnt and how we used it:
This raised the question of scientific uncertainty. From this interview, we kept working on finding other safety systems for our photobioreactor and started to think about potential alternatives for a better use of our microalgae.
Anne-Sophie Lepeuple:Head of the applied biotechnology department at Veolia. Veolia is a french multinational industry involved in environment protection.
Interview:
Mrs Lepeuple told us that microalgae brought an added value only for the production of some specific molecules. Indeed, she explained us how difficult it was to develop new processes for inexpensive and effective extraction and collection of some molecules in algae. This is the reason why algae are generally not used to produce biofuel or sugar for instance. Besides, she thinks the means to avoid the spread of our algae or of the molecules they can export in the environment would be too expensive.
What we learnt and how we used it:
We started considering to produce other types of molecules than sugar into our Chlamydomonas. We had therefore to focus more on our retrotransposon’s development for our microalgae to be a chassis for a wider range of application.
Jonathan D. Trent, Ph.D : is currently an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz and scientist at NASA Ames Research Center.
He’s currently the director of the "OMEGA project” (Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae). OMEGA is an integrated "life-support" system for Spaceship Earth, an "ecology of technologies" in which wastes from one part of the system are resources for another part. It combines algae cultivation for biofuel, wastewater treatment, and carbon capture, with electricity and heat generation using solar energy, drinking water production by osmosis, and food production by aquaculture. It expands the human sphere of influence into coastal waters while reduce our impact on coastal ecosystems, to preparate the future generations for sea-level rise. OMEGA is a work-in-progress with many remaining challenges, but the goals are of critical importance: sustainable energy, water and food availability, and minimization of our environmental impact.
Interview:As an expert of the technological use of sea, we contacted him to have his opinion about our project, and discuss about its feasibility and the challenges it will face. He showed great interest in our project and gave us some clues about the needs our directed evolution tool could answer, such as:
- Allow in increased resistance to temperature, with the goal to improve the growth of microalgae.
- Better the abilities of Chlamydomonas to produce of Omega 3.
- Create an enzyme to digest cell walls to ameliorate extraction procedures
- Set up a selection system so that we would not have to worry about contaminations
- A- The creation of a strain of microalgae able to grow in "semi-salty" waters used in some purification wastewater treatment station.
What we learnt and how we used it:We started considering to produce other types of molecules than sugar into our Chlamydomonas. We had therefore to focus more on our retrotransposon’s development for our microalgae to be a chassis for a wider range of application.
