The University of British Columbia

Purpose

L-arginine possesses numerous health benefits in humans, and it is an essential amino acid in cats and dogs and required at a high level in pet food. This amino acid has also been used in food as a flavoring agent and pharmaceutical industries for medical/clinical applications and health benefits. L-arginine can be produced by bacterial fermentation through various bioengineering technologies and also chemical synthesis. In pet industry, a synthetic source of L-arginine has been used for many years; however, the synthetic L-arginine is costly and has a bad taste. Microalgae is an underexploited crop for production of nutrients and bioactive compounds. NRC has established a microalgae library and identified strains have identified a few species/strains containing high contents of L-arginine. The goal of this project is to produce L-arginine in microalgae by testing the scalability of the selected strains and to prepare for a metabolic engineering approach by collecting genome-wide gene expression information during the arginine-producing growth conditions.