Yesterday the Devarenne lab had a paper published in the journal Nature Communications describing some of our recent research on the green microalga Botryococcus braunii, race L. The study describe the isolation and characterization of the enzyme LOS, which catalyzes the first committed step in lycopadiene biosynthesis. The work is the focus of graduate student Hem Thapa’s thesis studies.
The Texas A&M news service also wrote a news article about the study in Enzyme discovery leads scientists further down path to pumping oil from plants
Interestingly, the BBC World Service saw the news article and they interviewed Tim about our work on B. braunii: