The latest issue of Cytologia (Vol. 85, Issue 2) includes a regular paper on the long-awaited karyotype analysis of the primitive red alga, Cyanidioschyzon merolae 10D, by Kuroiwa et al. (2020) and a technical note by Miyagishima and Fujiwara (2020) introducing a method to induce a controllable gene expression system in C. merolae. In recent years, Cytologia has focused on introducing the latest research on microalgae and has published excellent papers, such as the two mentioned above. An analysis of worldwide trends in microalgae research based on a bibliometric study found that the number of published papers has increased exponentially since 1990 and 2008. The most relevant journals in this field are Bioresource Technology and Algal Research. Similarly, the number of papers in Cytologia is increasing steadily. Much interest is focused on Chlorella and Chlamydomonas. The major keywords appearing in more than 1,000 articles are those related to microalgae culture, such as biomass, biofuels, lipids, and their applications, or methodologies such as bioreactor. Today, microalgae are attracting attention (i) as sources of high-value compounds such as carotenoids, polyunsaturated fatty acids and phycobiliproteins, (ii) as whole biomass used as ingredients for food and feed, (iii) as extracts or processed biomass to produce biofuel and biofertilizers, and (iv) for bioremediation to ameliorate wastewater, soil, and polluted smoke. In this paper, we focus on how algae and microalgae are treated in Cytologia.

No abstract