“…Engineering "intermediate" antenna sizes in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii improved photosynthetic rates and biomass yields on the order of 10-30% in laboratory cultures (Polle et al, 2001;Mussgnug et al, 2005;Melis, 2009;Perrine et al, 2012). To achieve an intermediate antenna size, the synthesis of Chl b, which is bound only to the peripheral light-harvesting antenna complex proteins, was reduced by inhibiting the synthesis of Chl a oxygenase, the enzyme that converts Chl a into Chl b, using RNAi technology (Perrine et al, 2012). Most recently, this approach to reduce antenna size, and thus increase biomass productivity, was performed in C. sorokiniana, where UV mutagenesis was utilized to isolate truncated antenna mutants (Cazzaniga et al, 2014).…”