Assimilation of various organic carbon sources by Haematococcus strains

Abstract

Differences in the assimilation of individual organic compounds (5 mM sugars and L-asparagine) under mixotrophic growth conditions were described for three naturally occurring Haematococcus strains.The effects of assimilation were measured by the growth intensity and size of algal cells, and the effect of colour changes in the cultures was observed. Some compounds caused the cell colouration to change from green to yellow, being the result of chlorophyll disappearance and the accumulation of yellow secondary carotenoids. In the present experiment none of the cultures turned red, thus excluding the intense accumulation of the commercially interesting carotenoid, astaxanthin.

Mixotrophic Growth of Astaxanthin-Rich Alga Haematococcus pluvialis using Refined Crude Glycerol as Carbon Substrate: Batch and Fed-Batch Cultivations

“…The use of crude glycerol for culturing various strains of microalgae for the purpose of enhancing biomass and bioproduct production has been well-demonstrated [57][58][59][60][61]. For H. pluvialis, although the microalga has been previously reported to grow using a number of organic carbon substrates [38,[62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70], there have only been a few studies on microalgal cultivation using glycerol [68,71]. Therefore, current limited knowledge of the use of biodiesel-derived glycerol for cultivating the green alga H. pluvialis has led to the conduction of this study, which aims to: 1) investigate the possibility of using biodiesel-derived glycerol as an organic carbon source, facilitating the growth of H. pluvialis batch culture under heterotrophic and mixotrophic conditions (the autotrophic growth condition was used as the control condition); 2) examine ATX accumulation in H. pluvialis cells, produced from different greenstage growth conditions, and 3) to investigate the use of repeated fed-batch cultivation as a tool to enhance the growth and ATX production of H. pluvialis.…”