[All] Concerns about free-rein (like BP?) GMO approaches to Algae for Fuel

[Robert Milligan]

FYI -- more GMO cowboy scientists (potential Planet destroyers) unable  
&/or unwilling to comprehend the concept of social and environmental  
responsibility?
R

Exploring Algae as Fuel	In a laboratory where almost all the test  
tubes look green, the tools of modern biotechnology are being applied  
to lowly pond scum. Foreign genes are being spliced into algae and  
native genes are being tweaked. Different strains of algae are pitted  
against one another in survival-of-the-fittest contests in an effort  
to accelerate the evolution of fast-growing, hardy strains. The goal  
is nothing less than to create superalgae, highly efficient at  
converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into lipids and oils that can  
be sent to a refinery and made into diesel or jet fuel. “We’ve  
probably engineered over 4,000 strains,” said Mike Mendez, a co- 
founder and vice president for technology at Sapphire Energy, the  
owner of the laboratory. “My whole goal here at Sapphire is to  
domesticate algae, to make it a crop.” Dozens of companies, as well as  
many academic laboratories, are pursuing the same goal — to produce  
algae as a source of, literally, green energy. And many of them are  
using genetic engineering or other biological techniques, like  
chemically induced mutations, to improve how algae functions. “There  
are probably well over 100 academic efforts to use genetic engineering  
to optimize biofuel production from algae,” said Matthew C. Posewitz,  
an assistant professor of chemistry at the Colorado School of Mines,  
who has written a review of the field. “There’s just intense interest  
globally.” Algae are attracting attention because the strains can  
potentially produce 10 or more times more fuel per acre than the corn  
used to make ethanol or the soybeans used to make biodiesel. Moreover,  
algae might be grown on arid land and brackish water, so that fuel  
production would not compete with food production. And algae are  
voracious consumers of carbon dioxide, potentially helping to keep  
some of this greenhouse gas from contributing to global warming. But  
efforts to genetically engineer algae, which usually means to splice  
in genes from other organisms, worry some experts because algae play a  
vital role in the environment. The single-celled photosynthetic  
organisms produce much of the oxygen on earth and are the base of the  
marine food chain.

http://www.microbeworld.org/index.php?option=com_jlibrary&view=user&user=ghogan&limitstart=1920
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