Abstract
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2025.The increasing demand and trends for sustainable energy resources have propelled the development and improvements of fourth-generation biofuels. Through the generations of biofuels, the fourth-generation biofuels, supported by advanced global research, have the potential to provide a suitable option for sustainable bioenergy production. Algal biomass is supported as a favorable feedstock due to its rapid photosynthetic performance and high lipid accumulation. The cytogenetic interventions can result in engineered algae and advanced biochemistry can improve the quality and quantity of fourth-generation biofuels. This review explores the potential cytogenetic interventions to enhance algal biomass yield, increase photosynthetic rate, target biochemical processes, explore genetic manipulation study, and genome editing methods under integrated biorefinery research. Different algal strains have variable lipid content. Higher lipid contents will have high calorific values, photosynthetic rates, and increased CO2 capture efficiency with multiple non-extractive environmental benefits. Successful feedstock optimization supports the production processes in the biorefinery system of algal biofuels on a large economic scale. It can only be achieved through cytogenetic improvements of selected algal strains, which results in optimizing biorefinery processes. Such transformed strains can harvest high amounts of energy and green algae are suitable for biofuel production in the future. Future research should focus on developing more precise and cost effective genome editing tools for algal strains, and on integrating artificial intelligence and bioinformatics for modeling advanced mega bioreactors for sustainable production of biofuels.
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Springer Nature