In response to the energy crisis microalgae are a promising feedstock for biofuel production. The use of metabolic engineering to improve yields of biofuel-related lipid components in microalgae, without affecting cell growth, is now recognized as a promising and more economically feasible approach to develop more sustainable energy sources. For this, we generated Chlamydomonas mutant strains using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to knockout a gene involved in fatty acid (FA) degradation. In the knockout mutant, total lipid accumulated up to 28% of dried biomass, while that of wild-type (WT) was 22%. This increase was also accompanied by a noticeable shift in FA composition with an increase up to 27.2% in the C18:1 proportion. In addition, these mutants showed comparable growth rate to the WT, indicating that inhibiting lipid catabolism through gene editing technology is a promising strategy to develop microalgal strains for biofuel production.

为了应对能源危机，微藻是用于生物燃料生产的有前途的原料。如今，人们公认将代谢工程技术用于提高微藻中生物燃料相关脂质成分的产量而又不影响细胞生长的方法，是开发更具可持续性的能源的一种有希望且在经济上可行的方法。为此，我们产生了衣藻突变菌株使用CRISPR-Cas9技术敲除涉及脂肪酸（FA）降解的基因。在敲除突变体中，总脂质积累高达干生物质的28％，而野生型（WT）的脂质为22％。这种增加还伴随着FA组成的明显变化，C18：1比例增加了27.2％。另外，这些突变体显示出与野生型相当的生长速率，表明通过基因编辑技术抑制脂质分解代谢是开发用于生物燃料生产的微藻菌株的有前途的策略。