Developing diatoms for value-added products: challenges and opportunities

As a major primary producer in marine environments, diatoms have been considered as promising feedstocks for their applications in functional foods, bioactive pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics. This review focuses on the biotechnology potential of diatoms for value-added products like carotenoids. The impact of abiotic environmental stresses, such as intensity and quality of incident light, nutrient deficiency and silicon depletion, on diatoms has been examined to determine key factors that affect the growth performance and the accumulation of valuable compounds. Previous studies suggested that adaptive evolution could be an efficient method to improve the diatom productivity of valuable compounds. Light emitting diode (LED)-based photobioreactors were introduced and proposed as a promising new technology for producing quality products from diatoms. Currently available molecular biology tools were also summarized and discussed in relation to their application in the production of carotenoids and other valuable products. Taken together, systems biology and synthetic biology approaches have the potential to address the challenges faced while working toward the industrial application of diatoms.