title: Tipping points in seaweed genetic engineering: scaling up opportunities in the next decade.
abstract: Seaweed genetic engineering is a transgenic expression system with unique features compared with those of heterotrophic prokaryotes and higher plants. This study discusses several newly sequenced seaweed nuclear genomes and the necessity that research on vector design should consider endogenous promoters, codon optimization, and gene copy number. Seaweed viruses and artificial transposons can be applied as transformation methods after acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of viral infections in seaweeds and transposon patterns in seaweed genomes. After cultivating transgenic algal cells and tissues in a photobioreactor, a biosafety assessment of genetically modified (GM) seaweeds must be conducted before open-sea application. We propose a set of programs for the evaluation of gene flow from GM seaweeds to local/geographical environments. The effective implementation of such programs requires fundamentally systematic and interdisciplinary studies on algal physiology and genetics, marine hydrology, reproductive biology, and ecology.
authors.affiliation: Environmental Biophysics and Molecular Ecology Program, Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, 71 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA. lin@marine.rutgers.edu.
authors.forename: Hanzhi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Coastal Biology and Bio-resource Utilization, Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 17 Chunhui Road, Yantai 264003, China. sqin@yic.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Song
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Qin
mesh_terms: D005818:Genetic Engineering / Q000639:trends*; D016678:Genome; D023281:Genomics; D030781:Organisms, Genetically Modified; D012624:Seaweed / Q000235:genetics* / Q000502:physiology