海洋生物資源を利用した新エネルギーの開発(<特集>水生・海洋バイオマスの生産および燃料への転換技術の開発現状と展望)

概要

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The marine environment is remarkably diverse and harbors a wide variety of organisms that have acquired novel metabolic functions and corresponding genes through evolutionary adaptation. Marine organisms are potentially a treasure of gene resources. Especially, much attention has been paid to photosynthetic organisms because they can grow with inorganic carbon fixation, produce useful materials and convert photo-energy into bio-fuel. On the other hand, it is known that standard culturing techniques account for only 1 % or less of the bacterial diversity in the environments. Therefore, recently, marine metagenomic approach with construction of genomic libraries by direct extraction and cloning of DNA from environmental samples has been applied to analyze and utilize the unculturable microbes as gene resources. Furthermore, it has also become important tool for screening useful enzyme genes in biofuel production.
2012-11-20