Plant Biotechnology and Global Sustainability - Part 4 of 4

Key Findings and Perspective of the Future

With increasing emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide and, given the damage this can cause us, it is of greater importance to combat this trend. Knowing this, plant biotechnology can play a crucial role, combining proactivity with knowledge.

The use of biofuels such as biodiesel and their production through microalgae, and their use in the assimilation of greenhouse gases, bring us closer and closer to the light of a sustainable future at the end of the tunnel. In the end, these two approaches, both preventive and corrective, should be used in tune, a crucial advantage that could counteract the greatest setback that opposes further evolution of these technologies, cost.

The growing interest in this area of plant biotechnology is a great hypothesis to dethrone the use of fossil fuels and delay the already irreversible effect of increased CO2 (Chisti, 2008, Demirbas, 2009, Solomon et al., 2009 ; Nigam and Singh 2011).

A future in which this type of fuel is used more, or this type of technology in the air cleaning through the enormous potential of the microalgae passes by: there is greater technological advances both on the production of biomass as in the processes downstream of the production of biofuels; a better metabolic and genetic understanding, to enable the creation of more capable strains; combination of several areas (CO2 sequestration, biodiesel production and purification of waste water, for example); and other large-scale studies (Hu et al., 2008, Hannon, 2010, Nigam and Singh, 2011, Pittman et al., 2011, Ghasemi et al., 2012, Chawla et al., 2014, Voloshin et al. 2016).

Basically, there has to be a paradigm shift. We are able at a cost to increase production using this organism, but can we for the price to a sustainable and environmentally safe future?

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