Chapter 13 - Microalgal biomass cultivation

Abstract

Despite the initial interest, since the early 1950s, in microalgae as a source of biofuels to overcome the widespread negative impact on environment caused by fossil fuels, recent research studies turned the community's attention to high-added-value products from other biotechnological fields (e.g., food and feed, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, chemical). However, despite of the possible added-value, optimizing algal biomass cultivation arises as a permanent need at industrial scale to increase cost-effectiveness. Therefore, depending on the selected microalgae, many other features such as nutrition type, cultivation mode and strategies, cultivation system selection, and microalgal products' application must be considered. All these issues will be addressed in this chapter aiming at being an aid to tackle current drawbacks occurring during microalgal biomass cultivation.