A new approach for detection and quantification of microalgae in industrial-scale microalgal cultures.

In industrial-scale microalgal cultures, non-target microalgae compete with the desired species for nutrients and CO, thus reducing the growth rate of the target species and the quality of the produced biomass. Microalgae identification is generally considered a complicated issue; although, in the last few years, new molecular methods have helped to rectify this problem. Among the different techniques available, DNA barcoding has proven very useful in providing rapid, accurate, and automatable species identification; in this work, it is used to assess the genomic identity of the microalga species Scenedesmus sp.