Department of Energy Funding Opportunity: Productivity Enhanced Algae and Tool-Kits (PEAK)

Through this FOA, DOE will support multidisciplinary biological innovation to deliver strains, tools, data, and techniques to enhance algal biofuel potential and enable accelerated future innovation in algal biofuels and bioproducts.

This FOA will fund a variety of projects and approaches that overcome species-specific, ecological, and practical challenges to achieving improved algal areal productivity and to fuel yield (i.e. biomass composition).

This FOA has two topic areas:

1) Topic Area 1: Strain Improvement

This topic area is for small teams to develop enhanced algal strains with increased areal productivity and biofuel yield, along with improved or novel algal toolkits and/or methods. Strain improvement methods may include gene discovery and biological pathway analysis, directed evolution, breeding, and/or genetic engineering of novel algal strains that can reproducibly out-perform the current best available strains in outdoor conditions, where “performance” is represented by productivity, robustness, and composition. Applicants must include a detailed discussion of the reasoning behind their proposed strategy or strategies, strain choice, and why the proposed strain improvement approach has/have the highest
probability of success.

2) Topic Area 2: Cultivation Biology Improvement

This topic area is for small teams to develop increased areal productivity and biofuel yield through enhanced management of ecological or abiotic contributions to cultivation biology, along with improved or novel algal toolkits and/or methods. Cultivation biology development improvements may include leveraging natural or designed microbial assemblages of the algal culture ecosystem to boost performance and resist pathogens, and understanding species-specific cultivation conditions.

This topic area is about improving management of a current cultivation system. Abiotic contributions, including nutrient and stochastic climatological variables, can have a profound effect on outdoor performance. Topic Area 2 supports improving the understanding of physiology and performance under fluctuating and uncontrollable abiotic conditions. Applicants must include a detailed discussion of the reasoning behind their proposed strategy or strategies and why the proposed cultivation improvement approach has/have the highest probability of success.

The FOA will require selected projects to participate in a cultivation readiness validation and benchmarking, or friendly “challenge”, the PEAK Challenge. In the PEAK Challenge, project performers will, after passing an interim Go/No-Go decision point to validate seasonal areal productivity and biomass composition, and towards the conclusion of their development efforts, cultivate their organism(s) in an outdoor relevant environment – a field-based campaign with adequate controls and duration. Utilizing the growing season and cultivation equipment of their choice, each team will demonstrate their peak productivity potential over the course of their culture’s growth curve during this field challenge.

The full Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is posted on the EERE eXCHANGE website at https://eere-exchange.energy.gov. Applications must be submitted through the EERE eXCHANGE website to be considered for award. The applicant must first register and create an account on the EERE eXCHANGE website. A User Guide for the EERE eXCHANGE can be found on the EERE website https://eere- exchange.energy.gov/Manuals.aspx after logging in to the system.

Information on where to submit questions regarding the content of the announcement and where to submit questions regarding submission of applications is found in the full FOA posted on the EERE eXCHANGE website.