Microalgae produce higher biomass and oil yields than traditional energy crops, and they can be cultivated on marginal land or in seawater. Additional benefits can be achieved from co-production of food, feed and high-value chemicals as well as from environmental services, such as bio-fixation of CO2 and wastewater treatment. However, biotechnical, environmental, and economic challenges need to...

As a result of high production costs, commercial products from microalgae must command high prices. Astaxanthin produced by Haematococcus is a product that has become a commercial reality through novel and advanced technology. Cultivation methods have been developed to produce Haematococcus containing 1.5-3.0% astaxanthin by dry weight, with potential applications as a pigment source in aquacul...

BACKGROUND Small-scale micro-bioreactors have become the cultivation vessel of choice during the first steps of bioprocess development. They combine high cultivation throughput with enhanced cost efficiency per cultivation. To gain the most possible information in the early phases of process development, online monitoring of important process parameters is highly advantageous. One of these impo...

Microalgae are fast-growing photosynthetic organisms which have the potential to be exploited as an alternative source of liquid fuels to meet growing global energy demand. The cultivation of microalgae, however, still needs to be improved in order to reduce the cost of the biomass produced. Among the major costs encountered for algal cultivation are the costs for nutrients such as CO₂, nitroge...

Biofuels have received much attention recently owing to energy consumption and environmental concerns. Despite many of the technologies being technically feasible, the processes are often too costly to be commercially viable. The major stumbling block to full-scale production of algal biofuels is the cost of upstream and downstream processes and environmental impacts such as water footprint and...

Decentralized, smart indoor cultivation systems can produce herbs and vegetables for fresh healthy daily nutrition of the urban population. This study assesses technical resource requirements, productivity, economic viability “Smart Office Farm” (SOF), based on a 5-week production cycle curled lettuce, lolo rosso, pak choi basil at three photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) levels using ra...

In general, morphological, physiological, and biochemical properties of fungal cells are drastically different among solid-state (SSC), liquid-surface (LSC), and submerged cultivation (SmC) systems. In addition to these traditional cultivation systems, a unique liquid-surface cultivation [liquid-surface immobilization (LSI)] system and interface cultivation systems [extractive liquid-surface im...

The impacts of global climate change have been a worldwide concern for several research areas, including those dealing with resources essential to human well being, such as agriculture, which directly impact economic activities and food security. Here we evaluate the relative effect of climate (as indicated by the Ecological Niche Model-ENM) and agricultural technology on actual soybean product...