PhD Graduate student Junyao Gu produced podcast on our group’s efforts to develop marine microalgae as a sustainable platform for fuel, feed and food has just been released. Her from current and former students and researchers on the group’s efforts and how their participation helped shape their career trajectory. https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/seastheday/2022/11/02/episode-24-algae-biofuel-the-future/
Yearly Archives: 2022
8 posts
By mid-century, society will need to significantly intensify the output of its food production system while simultaneously reducing that system’s detrimental impacts on climate, land use, freshwater resources, and biodiversity. This will require finding alternatives to carbon emissions-intensive agriculture, which provides the backbone of today’s global food production system. Here, […]
Accurate and robust retrieval of ocean color from remote sensing enables critical observations of aquatic natural systems, from open ocean biological oceanography, coastal biodiversity, and water quality for human health. In the last decade, studies have increasingly highlighted the important role of small-scale processes in coastal and marine ecology and […]
The Johnson Lab was selected for a Spark Award for pilot demonstration of carbon capture/storage technology based on ABECCS (Algae with BioEnergy Carbon Capture and Storage). As atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise there are substantial negative impacts to the environment and societies across the globe. Beyond just reducing […]
Disturbances, here defined as events that directly alter microbial community composition, are commonly studied in host-associated and engineered systems. In spite of global change both altering environmental averages and increasing extreme events, there has been relatively little research into the causes, persistence and population-level impacts of disturbance in the dynamic […]
While planktonic microbes play key roles in the coastal oceans, our understanding of heterotrophic microeukaryotes’ ecology, particularly their spatiotemporal patterns, drivers, and functions, remains incomplete. In this study, we focus on a ubiquitous marine fungus-like protistan group, the Labyrinthulomycetes, whose biomass can exceed that of bacterioplankton in coastal oceans but […]
The biological pump plays a vital role in exporting organic particles into the deep ocean for long-term carbon sequestration. However, much remains unknown about some of its key microbial players. In this study, Labyrinthulomycetes protists (LP) were used to understand the significance of heterotrophic microeukaryotes in the transport of particulate […]
Using a commercially scalable system designed for processing thousands of liters a day, here we evaluated the factors that affected the performance, energy consumption and capital/operating costs of both flocculation-based and filtration-based algal harvesting systems over a 16 month period. Coagulation efficiency was the primary driver of harvest efficiency in the […]