PR000454 (Project)

Description:A study to investigate the effect of small molecule lipid inducing compounds that leads to hyper accumulation of lipids in N replete cells of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. These compounds were identified through a high throughput screening designed for that purpose. During that screening, we screened 43,783 compounds and identified 367 primary hits. These 367 hits were further retested using a 8-point dilution series (from 0.25 to 30 uM) and verified the activity of 250 compounds that induce the hyper lipid accumulating phenotype in algae. Once the hit compounds were identified and confirmed, we then performed extensive chemoinformatics analysis to look for common scaffolds and identified several common substructures. We then selected 15 top performing compounds from 5 diverse structural groups and tested biochemical parameters such as growth, lipid accumulating capacity, effect on photosynthetic rates, respiration rates, oxygen consumption rates, analysis of different lipid species to quantify and identify fatty acid species using GC-MS. To understand the global changes in the metabolome, 2 structurally different compounds were selected and compared with cells grown without compounds as control for untargeted metabolomics analysis.