This is a confidential report on the design and implementation of in silico methods for large-scale comparative analysis of desaturase genes from all branches of life, with the goal of defining methods for predicting function, specificity, and regiospecificity. The work included a systematic, multi-criteria comparison of candidate proteins, integrating sequences, annotations, structures and experimental results. The biotechnological context for this work is the search for production of polyunsaturated fatty acids of nutritional interest at industrial scale by cultivating green algae directly, rather than relying on commercial fishing to recover fatty acids concentrated through the food chain. Ultimately, the cultivated algae may be domesticated strains of naturally occurring species, or engineered strains developed by genetic engineering or synthetic biology. For confidentiality reasons the full content of this report cannot be disseminated at this time.