Last week, I had the fortune of attending the Algal Biofuels Symposium held by the San Diego Algae Biotechnology Center which was founded by Professor Mayfield and his colleagues. The next few posts will focus on what happened at this symposium. Source: http://notafreemason.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/algae-oil.jpg The introductions were held by Professor Steve Kay, who is the Dean of Biology at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Kay noted that algal research has been steadily rising since the early 1990s again. Since the 2000s the growth curve of algal research resembles that of an early exponential growth as determined by number of publications with the keyword "algae". Key to this resurgence in algal research has been the advance of technologies in molecular biology, sequencing, and bioinformatics. Of note is that there has been an explosion in algal biofuels research since late 2008. The exponential growth exponential growth in algal research coincid...