Strain Selection for Green Algae Production

At this stage of the game, it is time far better spent to choose a technology that you, your environment and your climate are comfortable with than spend endless hours identifying and selecting some better strain of algae.

They are just now starting up the Moores Curve of Genetic Engineering of algae strains. The algae available in a year will be much better than anything found in the industry today. The year after that, they will make more strain improvements, leaving the previous year strains obsolete.

We will see the engineering of algae strains not only to excel in a specific growing environment, but also specifically designed for a given processing technology and to better produce the products desired.

This continual strain improvement for every likely growing environment on earth, every important processing technology and the specific products desired will continue for a very long time, generations in fact. Your grandchildren will work with algae strains you can not even dream of today.

The day will come, in a few years, that each algae grower will set their own parameters for a perfect algae strain. They will be able to tell the GM labs exactly what products they are producing, what technologies they are working with, what their environment is and on and on.

The labs will combine algae and other genes specifically for you and the parameters you set, and do so quickly and cheaply. Your strain will be a one of a kind strain, unlike any other strain on earth.

We are starting to do this with corn. Corn grown for an ethanol distillery is not the same corn you would plant for human food or animal feed, and of course it is not sweet corn nor pop corn.

The GM industry is not yet to the point of engineering corn seed for a specific farmers field, but they are getting closer. It will happen first with algae because of the short generational span of algae, days or even hours versus months and years for corn.

It is the same with all important plants on earth, rice, wheat, roses and jojoba. The impact of GM on plant life; food supply, energy crops and the beauty of flowers is in its infancy and we will be riding the Moores Curve of strain development forever.