Typical morphology of D. armatus with terminal spines and intracellular changes in morphology (due to storage carbohydrate accumulation) under nitrogen-replete and -deplete (inset) conditions which occur in late-stage cultures once nitrogen is depleted from the medium. Images courtesy of Nick Sweeney, NREL.

The genome and transcriptome sequences of Desmodesmus armatus SE107 were not determined by the Joint Genome Institute (JGI). The genome was sequenced with Pacbio and assembled with HGAP at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL). The transcriptome was provided by Sapphire Energy, and then assembled with Trinity by JGI. Subsequently, the JGI Annotation Pipeline was used to generate structural and functional annotations.

Desmodesmus armatus SE107 was originally isolated from a Las Cruces, NM, wastewater treatment pond in 2012 and developed for outdoor biofuels production (White, 2015).

The innate robustness and proven reliability of D. armatus in outdoor mass culture provides a robust yet flexible strain potentially leading to the commercial use of D. armatus as a bioenergy-relevant alga. The genus Desmodesmus is taxonomically divergent from the genus Scenedesmus and has been shown to exhibit phenotypic plasticity and resilience, allowing survival in harsh and variable environments, including brackish and salt water, and to possess other beneficial traits relevant to outdoor, large-scale, biomass production (Knoshaug et al., 2020, Douchi et al., 2022, White and Ryan, 2015).