Microalgae: The Multifaceted Biomass of the 21st Century

Abstract

Microalgae are unicellular, eukaryotic organisms which possess unique qualities of replication, producing biomass as a precursor for biofuels, nutraceuticals, biofertilizer, and fine chemicals including hydrocarbons. Microalgae access nitrates and phosphates in wastewater from municipalities, industries, and agricultural processes to grow. Wastewater is, therefore, culture media for microalgae, and provides the needed nutrients, micronutrients, inorganic and organic pollutants to produce microalgae biomass. Suitable strains of microalgae cultivated under mesophilic conditions in wastewater with optimized hydrodynamics, hydraulic retention time (HRT), luminous intensity, and other co-factors produce biomass of high specific growth rate, high productivity, and with high density. The hydrodynamics are determined using a range of bioreactors from raceway ponds, photobioreactors to hybrid reactors. Carbon dioxide is used in the photosynthetic process, which offers different growth stimuli in the daytime and the night-time as the microalgae cultivation technique is navigated between autotrophy, heterotrophy, and mixotrophy resulting in microalgal lipids of different compositions.