Applications of microfluidics in microalgae biotechnology: A review.

Biotechnol J

Department of Chemical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan.

Published: March 2016

AI Article Synopsis

  • Microalgae are a promising source for biofuel production due to their benefits like not competing with food supplies, higher energy density, and carbon dioxide absorption to combat global warming.
  • Successful biofuel production relies on finding microalgae with desirable traits and continuous monitoring of their growth conditions, but traditional methods can be complicated and labor-intensive.
  • Microfluidics technology provides a more efficient alternative, enabling easier cell identification, sorting, culturing, and disruption, and is also explored for use in micro-sized fuel cells and biosensing applications.

Article Abstract

Microalgae have been one of the important sources for biofuel production owing to their competitive advantages such as no need to tap into the global food supply chain, higher energy density, and absorbing carbon dioxide to mitigate global warming. One of the key factors to ensure successful biofuel production is that it requires not only bioprospecting of the microalgae with high lipid content, high growth rate and tolerance to environmental parameters but also on-site monitoring of the cultivation process and optimization of the culturing conditions. However, as the conventional techniques usually involve in complicated procedures, or are time-consuming or labor intensive, microfluidics technology offers an attractive alternative to resolve these issues. In this review, applications of microfluidics to bioprospecting in microalgae biotechnology were discussed such as cell identification, cell sorting/screening, cell culturing and cell disruption. In addition, utilization of microalgae in micro-sized fuel cells and microfluidic platforms for biosensing was addressed. This review reports the recent studies and offers a look into how microfluidics is exploited to tackle the issues encountered in the microalgae biotechnology.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/biot.201500278DOI Listing

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