Liu Xinyao entered the Department of Biotechnology, Peking University in 1998. He had been studying the microbe approach to control water bloom in Dianchi Lake with instruction from Prof. Chen Zhangliang, Former Vice President of PKU. Liu had three excellent papers published before graduating from PKU and was later accepted by Arizona State University.

The scientific community has focused for many years on developing renewable biofuels to compete with petroleum which has the advantage of scalability and low cost. As said by Roy Curtiss, professor of School of Life Science, Director of bio-Design Institute of Infectious Disease and Vaccine Studies Centre “By making bacteria release the precious things outside the cell, we optimized the technique to produce clean energy from bio-fuel.”

Cyanobacteriam are excellent organisms for biofuel production in that it is efficient at converting solar energy, and, unlike energy crops, can be grown on non-arable land.Liu Xinyao and Curtiss's approach is to change the DNA of cyanobacterium with genetic engineering, in order make it produce abundant green biofuel.

 "Simply put, my research is about how to use biotechnology methods to kill cyanobacterium, or inhibit their growth. I have lysised some cyanobacterium, algicidal bacteria and algae, and I found the result of killing algae in laboratory was good, but not as ideal in the wild aquatic environment. The main cause is that wild cyanobacterium is too strong to kill." said Liu when interviewed by the Science Times.

This study facilitates the actual use of such promising clean energy. Liu revealed that next step they would continue "re-programme" cyanobacterium, to make it better applied to large-scale industrialization bio-diesel production, and finally help with global energy shortage and environmental crisis.