FRIDOM aims to harness the high efficiency of algal metabolism for improving plant growth yield. The main underlying methodology used, which is unique to FRIDOM, is the ability to measure the actual metabolic rates of reactions in photosynthesis in live algal cells with very high-throuput (termed fluxome). By stable isotope labelling tools we developed for this project, we can quantify the rates of photosynthetic metabolism, in highly performing algal species, including the fastest alga on the plant, Chlorella ohadii, isolated from the Negev desert in Israel. In terms of experiments, this is extremely challenging as the half-times of many of these metabolic reactions is at the level of very few seconds. Once we are able to document these rates in several algae and under several growth conditions, we are able to identify reactions and associated enzymes which demonstrate superb rates in the highly-peroforming algae. This is the first step in raising targets from these algae for engineering into other, slower growing algae and plants. The other parts of FRIDOM involves our efforts to export the highly performing reactions from the fast algae, and introduce them into plants in order to test whether we can get them to grow faster or more efficiently. Once we succeed in finding such engineering targets, and find an improved growth phenotype, we use the same stable isotope labelling tools mentioned above to study the detailed mechanism of what happens inside the metabolic network of the engineered plants and algae. This is an informed approach to really understand what takes place inside their metabolic network, and not refer to the outcome as a 'black-box'. Cases where we can truly improve the growth yield of plants and algae, become immediately leads of projects aiming to reproduce the same engineering and effects in real crop plants, for improving their yield in the future, and supporting the increasing demand from agriculture.
