Improving a Culture System for Producing Biomolecules With High Commercial Potential From Microalgae

The development of marine biotechnologies is booming, particularly as regards the use of microalgal biomass in the production of high added-value biomolecules.

Over the past five years, Les Laboratoires Iso-BioKem, a partner in the project, has developed a new generation of production units (PBR) with a capacity of 100 L specially dedicated to the cultivation of microorganisms, including a unique isotope enrichment technology. These automated units offer a high degree of operational flexibility, including autotrophic or heterotrophic feeding modes. This production technology has been successfully tested on 22 strains of microalgae, several of which have a high commercial potential due to their atypical biochemical composition, with a wide diversity of biomolecules inherent in each species of microalgae cultivated.

Vith a view to optimizing production and promoting increased productivity and greater control over biological variability, the main aim of this project is to introduce a more efficient 2.0 version of the cultivation systems. To achieve this, the existing systems need to be improved: 1) The automated control interface needs to be improved and upgraded; 2) A new degassing device needs to be developed and integrated to control oxygen saturation without bubbling; 3) The systems need to be adapted to incorporate continuous or semi-continuous culture modes, depending on the microalgae species; 4) The extraction and purification of biomolecules methods need to be upgraded to establish and optimized production approach with the new culture modes.