Achieves Major Progress in Tropical Marine Microalgae Resource Development; A Decade of Successive Master's Student Efforts Published in Nature Communications
The Hainan Provincial Engineering Research Center for Marine Bioactive Substances and Bioproducts / College of Marine Biology and Aquaculture at Hainan University has made a significant breakthrough in the field of tropical marine microalgae resource development. The relevant results were published online in Nature Communications on January 13, 2026.
The study features Wang Aoqi, a Master’s student from the class of 2020, as the first author, and Professor Lu Yandu as the corresponding author. Hainan University is the sole completing unit. This achievement marks a major milestone resulting from a decade of "relay" scientific research by the team, providing a new type of chassis organism with broad application prospects for photosynthetic synthetic biology.
Hainan Island, a treasure trove of tropical biological resources in China, is known as a natural "species gene bank" and the largest "natural museum." In 2016, the team successfully isolated a strain of Chlorella sp. MEM25 with euryhaline (broad salt) adaptability from a natural salt lake on Hainan Island. This algal strain not only demonstrates high adaptability to temperature, salinity, and light intensity but also possesses the ability to efficiently synthesize high-quality proteins and polyunsaturated fatty acids.
· Lu Xiangning (Master’s class of 2017) and others systematically evaluated the stability and economic benefits of this algae during large-scale cultivation in Danzhou, Hainan, and Zhanjiang, Guangdong (Science of the Total Environment, 2021, 780, 146369).
· Chen Yuting (Master’s class of 2019, National Scholarship winner) innovatively combined microalgae cultivation with aquatic product processing, constructing an integrated green process for "carbon fixation and emission reduction — tail water treatment — high-value product production" (Biomass and Bioenergy, 2023, 178, 106952).
· Gu Jiahua (Master’s class of 2021, National Scholarship winner) and Postdoc Wu Mingcan utilized classic breeding strategies to further improve MEM25’s carbon fixation efficiency and targeted metabolite output levels (Biotechnology for Biofuels and Bioproducts, 2023, 16, 143), gradually solidifying the industrial foundation of MEM25 as a high-quality photosynthetic cell factory.
To achieve genetic modification and engineering applications for MEM25, Gu Xinping (Master’s class of 2018) and Deng Ying (Master’s class of 2020) jointly overcame bottlenecks in genetic operation technologies. They achieved, for the first time internationally, a synergistic expression system for single-vector multi-gene and dual-vector 6-8 genes in marine Chlorella, providing core technical assurance for multi-module assembly and function in microalgal chassis (Biotechnology for Biofuels and Bioproducts, 2023, 16:133). Furthermore, Cui Xinyu (Master’s class of 2020, National Scholarship winner), through continuous optimization, pioneered the implementation of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in MEM25, achieving an order-of-magnitude improvement in efficiency compared to existing methods (Plant Biotechnology Journal, 2025, 0, 1–3).
Focusing on the genetic basis of its robust environmental adaptability and efficient synthesis of high-value metabolites, Wang Aoqi (Master’s class of 2020) and colleagues constructed a library of M25 mutants containing 195 different genotypes. Combining high-precision genomic information and Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS), they systematically elucidated the genetic basis for its adaptation to a wide range of salinity environments and synchronized the verification of key salt-sensitive genes in both microalgae and higher plants. This work not only provides key theoretical evidence for understanding the evolution of marine organisms to freshwater habitats but also offers a rich source of stress-resistance elements for constructing enhanced photosynthetic chassis.
With its advantages of exceptional environmental robustness, efficient carbon fixation capacity, excellent metabolite production performance, and an increasingly perfected genetic operation system, the MEM25 strain is poised to become an ideal chassis for the next generation of photosynthetic cell factories, promoting the sustainable development of the green bio-manufacturing industry.
This research was supported by the National Key R&D Program and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The work was jointly completed by Master’s students Wang Aoqi (Class of 2020), Deng Ying (Class of 2020), and Han Xiao (Class of 2017). Gan Qinhua from the College of Tropical Crops led the strain breeding, phenotypic analysis, sample preparation, omics analysis, and Arabidopsis genetic validation; Xin Yi from the College of Marine Biology and Aquaculture made important contributions to the genetic transformation of Nannochloropsis.
This research achievement is an innovative model of deep interdisciplinary integration involving biology, marine science, aquaculture, and synthetic biology, strongly highlighting our college's level of collaborative tackling of key problems and frontier scientific innovation. At the same time, this high-level achievement, with Hainan University as the sole completing unit and a Master's student as the first author, reflects to a certain extent the major breakthroughs made by our college in innovating graduate training models and promoting the integration of science and education. It underscores significant progress in the "Research for Education, Relay Innovation" training mechanism.
Link to the original article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68287-6
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