NITROgen GENetics and physIology fOr Ulva compressa Sustainability

NITROGENIOUS is an interdisciplinary project that will provide unprecedented knowledge on the genetics and metabolism of the green seaweed Ulva compressa for a sustainable and thriving aquaculture.

Seaweed is the most rapidly expanding aquaculture sector with a potential to reduce the environmental impacts of terrestrial agriculture, to contribute to climate change mitigation and provide ecosystem services.

The main application for the cosmopolitan Ulva compressa, with a high growth rate under various environmental conditions, are food, feed, bioremediation. However, its domestication and breeding are still in their infancy and companies are largely relying on wild harvest.

NITROGENIOUS aims to elucidate genes and biochemical processes involved in nitrogen uptake and assimilation and to understand how they are impacted by increasing temperature, to improve yield and bioremediation capacity and to decrease the environmental impact of its farming.

More specifically it will a) clone and characterize genes for nitrogen uptake, assimilation and regulation to open the way to modern breeding; b) advance the knowledge of U. compressa nitrogen metabolism under optimal conditions and determine how it is affected by increased temperatures and c) test at pilot scale the most promising strains obtained in the lab for bioremediation potential and biomass yield.

Advanced methodologies will be employed in collaboration with the host lab scientific partners: chemically-induced mutagenesis, high-throughput phenotyping, whole genome sequencing, genome editing (in a secondment) and metabolic fluxes via liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry.Based on the results of the project, advantageous alleles could be selected from natural populations, and the physiological understanding gained will help optimizing N nutrition and cultivation techniques, to increase the production without increasing external input of fertilizers.