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Phytoplankton Dicrateria rotunda synthesizes hydrocarbons equivalent to petroleum

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TOYOHASHI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY (TUT)

Key points

We discovered that Dicrateria rotunda (D. rotunda), a species of Haptophyte, can synthesize hydrocarbons

equivalent to petroleum (saturated hydrocarbons with a carbon number ranging from 10 to 38). No organism

capable of petroleum production has been previously reported.

All of the eleven Dicrateria strains examined in this study, including ARC1 obtained during a science cruise in

the Arctic Ocean, were found to be capable of synthesizing a series of saturated hydrocarbons. This has

indicated that this capability of synthesis is common to the entire Dicrateria genus.

The saturated hydrocarbon content of the D. rotunda ARC1 increased under dark and nitrogen-deficient

conditions. Understanding the physiological function and synthesis pathways of these saturated hydrocarbons

may contribute to the development of biofuels in the future.

Director-General Naomi Harada and colleagues from the Research Institute for Global Change at the Japan Agency

for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, in collaboration with Assistant Professor Yuu Hirose from Toyohashi

University of Technology and Specially Appointed Professor Kazuyoshi Murata from the National Institute for

Physiological Sciences, discovered that the phytoplankton Dicrateria rotunda (D. rotunda) can synthesize a series of

saturated hydrocarbons with a carbon number ranging from 10 to 38 .

A phytoplankton community was collected from seawater of the Chukchi Sea during a science cruise of the research

vessel “Mirai” in the Arctic Ocean in 2013, from which we isolated and cultured the Arctic strain of D. rotunda, ARC1.

ARC1 contained a series of saturated hydrocarbons with a carbon number ranging from 10 to 38, which are

categorized as petrol (carbon number 10 to 15), diesel oils (carbon number 16 to 20), and fuel oils (carbon number

21 or higher) . Moreover, we examined ten additional strains of Dicrateria stored in culture collections, all of which

were found to be similarly capable of hydrocarbon synthesis, indicating that this was common to the

entire Dicrateria genus. This study is the first to report on an organism with the capability to synthesize hydrocarbons

equivalent to petroleum.

The capability of the ARC1 strain to synthesize saturated hydrocarbons was shown to increase depending on the

environmental conditions , and the findings of this study are expected to contribute to the development of biofuels in

the future.