Reviewer Comments - EERE

2011 Algae Platform Review – Reviewer Comments
Reviewer Comments are direct transcripts of commentary and material provided by the Platform’s
Review Panel. They have not been edited or altered by the Biomass Program.
perceived need to cover all bases in the proposal. Down-selects should occur as soon as possible to help
focus the program and reduce management burden. The down-selection process should be based on
realistic transparent projections related to the points identified by the researchers and listed in the first
paragraph above.
Reviewer: 5
This project is too large and the presentation too short for an adequate review. Overall communication
appeared good, but it was not clear that the many individual projects would receive timely and objective
evaluation by the managers and integration with the pilot- and full-scale production pipelines. With 50M
in funding, this project should produce algal biofuel. Will it be able to make timely changes in R&D so as
achieve that goal?
Reviewer: 6
As stated above, the program appears to be a relatively strong collection of project investigators who
bring their technology to the program without an appropriate overall view of just exactly is the overal
system of unit operations that will be applied, and how their technology should fit into the system. The PI
needs to set the tone and gials, and not let individuals assume their technology is the anchor around which
every other unit operation should bend.
Reviewer: 7
The project is too large and diverse to review based on a 1 hour presentation. All reviewer comments
should be viewed in that light. We don't have a clear picture of the overall effort and the state of progress.
The project is well-structured around specific quantitative goals and decision points.
It would be valuable to reveiwers and to project managers to have currently achieved results compared to
the stated project goal and to the pre-project state of technology for each activity.
Within the constraints of the funding structure and the interests of the participating partners, increase
focus on the biggest technical hurdles,--strain, cultivation, harvest, extraction and techno-economics. The
program will not fail due to lack of technology to convert lipids to fuels. Some of the co-product studies
appear to be premature because strain and process will dramatically affect co-product characteristics. Coproduct
work should be limited to early feasibility demonstration.
Algea screening processes need to be validated against pilot results to determine if the screening
processes and parameters select superior strains for end use conditions.
Having the project dispersed among many institutions does not appear to be a weakness.
Presenter Response
Yes, the consortium has already held several regular meetings during the past year, and will continue to
do this in the future. We agree completely with the reviewer and stated during the presentation that the
organism, Botryococcus braunii, is currently being sequenced by JGI. We did not try to infer any prior
involvement in this process by NAABB until our organization was formed. The community of scientists
that provided the materials for the JGI sequencing program included a team of investigators from Univ. of
Arizona, Texas A&M, LANL, Northern Arizona Univ., and the Univ. of Kentucky. Except for the last
two institutions, the others are part of the NAABB Botryococcus program, and these investigators are
currently working with JGI to finish the genomic sequencing of one of the strains, and annotating and
mining the sequence information that has already been provided by JGI. This is certainly something we
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