PristineCoasts – Harnessing Ulva’s Potential for Nutrient and Carbon Removal

Project:

This project aims to provide an attractive environmentally friendly solution to coastal eutrophication/pollution while generating value added products using the
sea lettuce Ulva spp. Our objectives are to:

i) screen a large population of Ulva strains to identify elite strains tailored for de-pollution in low salinity environment,

ii) provide a state-of-the art understanding of the primary metabolism of these species,

iii) design and implement a prototype water de-pollution system, and

iv) investigate valorisation pathways of Ulva biomass to incentivise the use of Ulva as a relevant system for water de-pollution.

High-throughput phenotyping platform being used to evaluate relative performance of Ulva strains.

Funding:

SFI: Frontiers for the Future Programme 2020

Publications:

2022:

Molecular Ecology Resources: Exhaustive reanalysis of barcode sequences from public repositories highlights ongoing misidentifications and impacts taxa diversity and distribution.

2021:

Algal Research: A sequencing-free assay for foliose Ulva species identification, hybrid detection and bulk biomass characterisation

Journal of Phycology: Foliose Ulva Species Show Considerable Inter-Specific Genetic Diversity, Low Intra-Specific Genetic Variation, and the Rare Occurrence of Inter-Specific Hybrids in the Wild