Scientists Investigate Ways to Transform Seaweed Into Energy and Food

A trio of Rutgers experts is leading the university effort with support from a science and technology philanthropy

A trio of scientists from Rutgers University-New Brunswick is studying the potential of turning a species of seaweed into a source of energy and food.

The researchers from the Rutgers Climate and Energy Institute ̵ working with other institutions ̵ are looking to transform naturally abundant, renewable materials into products such as biofuels, animal feed and biochemicals. The Rutgers team is one of five centers in the United States selected for a broad research effort.

Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic organization fostering the advancement of science and technology, awarded the university a portion of a $47.3 million grant to fund the effort. The Rutgers group is part of a new initiative, the Virtual Institute on Feedstocks of the Future, supported by Schmidt Sciences and, additionally, the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, a private foundation in Washington, D.C., supporting science benefiting farmers, consumers and the environment.

Leading the Rutgers effort are Shishir Chundawat, Rutgers’ Principal Investigator and an Associate Professor in the Rutgers School of Engineering’s Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering; Debashish Bhattacharya, a Distinguished Professor in the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences’ Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology; and Sagar Khare, a Professor in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

The team is hard at work establishing a virtual institute-sponsored research center called Sargassum BioRefinery (SaBRe). Along with Jose Avalos of Princeton University as the lead investigator, Chundawat at Rutgers and Loretta Roberson of the Marine Biological Laboratory will co-lead the SaBRe research center.

Chundawat discusses the research plans he and his colleagues are forming:

Energy, animal feed and chemicals from seaweed: How will you accomplish that?

Our goal is to convert a species of brown seaweed, called Sargassum, that grows naturally in our oceans into valuable products. We plan to produce biofuels, which are fuels like ethanol that are derived from living matter, as well as animal feed alongside various industrial chemicals.

We need to determine how, when, and where to collect this seaweed from the Atlantic Ocean. And we need to perfect a process that will extract organic and inorganic components from the seaweed.

The organic components will be converted into specific products such as biogas, biofuels and animal feed. From the residual inorganic components, we will isolate rare earth elements that are relevant to the production of electric vehicle batteries.

What question are you answering with this research?

Sargassum seaweed is native to the historical ‘Sargasso Sea’ that gives rise annually to the largest macroalgal bloom in the world. At its peak, this biomass, referred to as “The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt,” stretches 5,000 miles east to west, from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. The Earth’s rapidly warming climate combined with agricultural fertilizer runoff are catalyzing its growth which is leading to serious environmental concerns for coastal communities.

These communities – around the Gulf of Mexico, including Puerto Rico, Florida and other Caribbean islands, and in South America and West Africa – are experiencing a vast influx of the seaweed which produces unsightly and smelly mounds on beaches that have overwhelmed local landfills. Worse, microorganisms degrading the biomass release noxious gas that is harmful to humans and adversely impacts tourism.

With climate change intensifying, the question for us is whether we can remove this material — perhaps even catch it before it washes ashore — and make it into useful products. If we can, we would be converting a crisis into a valuable opportunity for sustainable development.

At SaBRe, we aim to develop Sargassum seaweed biorefinery processes that integrate various conversion technologies. Biorefineries are analogous to petrochemical refineries in the sense they produce complex products from feedstocks. However, we will be using renewable biomass as our starting point, rather than fossil fuel-derived materials. Recent advances in computational biology, environmental microbiology and advanced biomanufacturing are providing key tools that will enable us to discover and engineer new approaches.

Where did the idea for studying Sargassum as a potential energy and food source come from?

The idea for using seaweed productively has been around since ancient times. A seaweed like kelp has been part of human diets from the middle Stone Age, based on archaeological records.

Several countries, particularly in Asia, have successfully developed advanced agricultural practices over the last few hundred years to grow and harvest specialized seaweed species for food. In addition, with the rise of the modern chemical industry, seaweed has been used in a chemical process to isolate high-value chemicals relevant to diverse industries.

We have not yet tapped the full potential of seaweed as a raw material for industrial processes.

I have been involved in finding ways to use diverse biomass as “feedstocks” since I was a college sophomore. My doctoral and postdoctoral research focused on the development of novel enzymes and bioprocesses for conversion of cellulosic biomass to biofuels. At Rutgers, my group has been working toward applying advanced protein engineering tools and biophysical characterization methods to advance biomass processing into diverse bioproducts.

What strengths and interests do the three of you bring to the project? Do you each have specific tasks that relate to the whole?

Debashish Bhattacharya is focused on understanding the biology of Sargassum as well as its diverse microbiome. He and his team want to discover novel microbial genes associated with the natural degradation of Sargassum in the ocean and on beaches. They will collaborate with researchers at SaBRe to bioprospect samples from various sites around the Gulf of Mexico where Sargassum is naturally abundant and often found naturally shored at beaches.

I hope to characterize novel genes and discover advanced enzymes with relevant properties for industrial scale processes rendering Sargassum into simple sugars. I will collaborate with Sagar Khare to apply advanced computational methods to engineer improved enzymes for industrial applications. We will establish a unique biofoundry at Rutgers focused on screening native and engineered protein designs relevant to this work. Sagar will enhance the deconstruction process by making the identified enzymes better and more robust using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools for protein design.

What do you hope to achieve with your research?

We hope to learn how to sustainably convert Sargassum through commercially relevant processes to a diverse array of products. Given how climate change has brought about massive seaweed blooms, this resource is likely to be an abundant source of feedstock for many years to come. The SaBRe project has a 5-year timeline by which we optimistically hope to have a testbed facility in place for de-risking Sargassum utilization. However, it is likely we are still a decade or more away from seaweed biorefineries becoming a commercial reality.

This article was originally published by Rutgers Today.