Abstract
Plant feedstock with specific, modified developmental features has been a quest for centuries. Since the development and spread of agriculture, there has been a desire for plants producing disproportionate—or more abundant and more nutritional—biomass that meet human needs better than their native counterparts. Seaweed aquaculture, targeted for human consumption and the production of various raw materials, is a rapidly expanding field and its stakeholders have increasing vested interest for cost-effective and lucrative seaweed cultivation processes. Thus, scientific research on seaweed development is particularly timely: the potential for expansion of seaweed cultivation depends on the sector's capacity to produce seaweeds with modified morphological features (e.g., thicker blades), higher growth rates or delayed (or even no) fertility. Here, we review the various technical approaches used to modify development in macroalgae, which have attracted little attention from developmental biologists to date. Because seaweed (or marine macroalgae) anatomy is much less complex than that of land plants and because seaweeds belong to three different eukaryotic phyla, the mechanisms controlling their morphogenesis are key to understanding their development. Here, we present efficient sources of developmentally and genetically modified seaweeds—somatic variants, artificial hybrids and mutants—as well as the future potential of these techniques.
Highlights
Initiation and development of long-term seaweed genetic improvement programs are recommended, which include continuous selection processes targeting the maintenance of genetic diversity throughout the production of improved lines (Robinson et al, 2013)
Macroalgal stocks with altered morphological traits can either be continuously collected from the wild or generated on demand in culture facilities using a combination of techniques likely to modify the developmental traits in a stable way
Of little use in the aquaculture sector (Robinson et al, 2013), can target specific cellular mechanisms by selectively modifying the expression of key genes, as it has been performed for decades in land plants
Summary
The underlying mechanisms have been poorly studied, this variation in developmental morphological abnormalities has been attributed to a variety of factors, including the type of donor tissue from which protoplasts are prepared and the culture conditions employed for regeneration. Somatic Hybridization In addition to morphological variation induced by in vitro culture, hybridization is an important process that combines phylogenetically distinct genetic lineages and results in morphotypes that are either intermediate to the parental species or completely novel (Figure 1C).
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