Microalgae as a source of biodiesel precursor are promising by pointing out several advantages of its cultivation, such as able to be cultivated in non-arable land, high growth rate with high biomass yield, high lipid content, and renewable. Mass cultivation of microalgae requires large amount of nutrients which makes it economically impractical. To overcome this problem, an alternative medium which contains cheaper nutrients sources should be addressed. In this research, the growth and biomass productivity of Navicula sp. and Nannochloropsis sp. were compared in the commonly used F/2 medium and modified medium containing commercial NPK fertilizer. The results indicated that Navicula sp. and Nannochloropsis sp. can thrive in modified F/2-NPK medium under continuous illumination, while NPK-only medium didn’t show any significant increase in growth and biomass accumulation for both strains compared to initial cell inoculation. Cell optical density at 750 nm and biomass dry weight of 80% F/2 and 50% F/2 medium were comparable to that in F/2 control medium for both strains, indicating that Navicula sp. and Nannochloropsis sp. have a similar requirement for nutrients types. Furthermore, higher specific growth rate of Nannochloropsis sp. than Navicula sp. seen in both modified medium showed its favorable condition for growth.
Microalgae are unicellular photosynthetic microorganisms, ubiquitous in nature which can be found in freshwater, seawater, hypersaline lakes, even in deserts and arctic ecosystems. Chlorella sp. is a eukaryotic, unicellular, photosynthetic organism with a spherical shape of about 1 to 20 μm in diameter. In this study, the combination of commonly used Walne medium and commercial fertilizers (ZA, TSP and Urea) were proposed as a low-cost approach for the cultivation of Chlorella sp. in the laboratory basis. The modified commercial fertilizer medium formulation consisted of the combination of at least 5% of Walne with different proportion of ZA, TSP and Urea. The result indicated that the combination of 5% (v/v) Walne and 95% (v/v) urea was able to retain the algal growth as compared to the combination of Urea, TSP and ZA. The obtained specific growth for 5% (v/v) Walne and 95% (v/v) urea modified medium was 0.246 d-1 and biomass productivity resulted 28 mg/L/d, which was comparable with commonly used Walne medium. Therefore, urea was primarily considered as the most suitable nitrogen source to support the growth of Chlorella sp. in the laboratory basis. Furthermore, modified commercial fertilizer medium developed in this study could potentially substitute the enriched medium used in the laboratory for the outdoor large-scale cultivation of microalgae.
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