Prospects and challenges for industrial production of seaweed bioactives.

Large-scale seaweed cultivation has been instrumental in globalizing the seaweed industry since the 1950s. The domestication of seaweed cultivars (begun in the 1940s) ended the reliance on natural cycles of raw material availability for some species, with efforts driven by consumer demands that far exceeded the available supplies. Currently, seaweed cultivation is unrivaled in mariculture with 94% of annual seaweed biomass utilized globally being derived from cultivated sources.