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.
Baseline and long term goals for strain performance would clarify and emphasize relevance. A method
and partner for evaluating commercial potential needs to be identified.
Response: The funding amount has limited this to a laboratory-based study, but baseline productivity has
been measured (slides 9 and 11 in the presentation) and provides a basis for monitoring improvement. To
our knowledge, there is no existing data relating lab-based productivity to large-scale outdoor
productivity (and this is likely to be highly variable depending on the species), therefore we cannot
predict how our measure of improvement will translate to production, however, the only way to determine
this is to generate the improved strains and test them, and based on first principles, it is logical to assume
that at least some of the improvements generated in the lab will result in improved production. If
additional funding can be provided to allow us to interface with a commercial partner, we would be happy
to do so.
4. Critical Success Factors
The project has identified critical factors, (including technical, business, market, regulatory, and legal
factors) that impact the potential technical and commercial success of the project
The project has presented adequate plans to recognize, address, and overcome these factors
The project has the opportunity to advance the state of technology and impact the viability of commercial
algal biomass feedstock supply and conversion, through one or more of the following:
i. Cross-Cutting Analysis (ex. economic analysis, sustainability analysis, resource assessments, risk
assessments)
ii. Feedstock Supply R&D (ex. biology, cultivation, resource use, biomass characteristics,
harvesting/dewatering)
iii. Downstream Refining R&D (ex. extraction, conversion, fuel, products, fuel/product infrastructure and
end-use)
iv. Environmental sustainability (example: water use, GMOs, energy consumption)
Reviewer Comments
Reviewer: 1 Criteria Score: 6
As an exploratory program, some latitude can be given in expressing these.
Reviewer: 2 Criteria Score: 6
Demonstrating genetic manipulations and manipulations of nutrient "checkpoints" and "switches" that are
persistent over many generations of diatoms is important to final success of this excellent basic scientific
work to biofuels' development. Given that GMO algae may not be acceptable in commercial use in open
facilities, characterizing heterotrophic growth in the context of the checkpoints/carbon flux under N and
Si deprivation may be of interest----and trying to find natural switches for the cell cycle that can be
applied w/o transformation.
Given that diatoms reach a cardinal point where sexual reproduction is necessary to restore vegetative
size, how will the genetic transformations and knockdown capability react to the diatom life history? Of
course, some diatoms use vegetative processes to restore the largest cell size of the population, in the
absence of sex, but as the population size decreases, sex is still critical in most species to restore cell size.
Please reflect on these problems in your work.
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