Nitrogen-fixer enhances lipid yields in algal polycultures

Stockenreiter, Maria und Litchman, Elena (2019): Nitrogen-fixer enhances lipid yields in algal polycultures. In: Algal Research-Biomass Biofuels and Bioproducts, Bd. 44, UNSP 101676

Abstract

Current algal biomass research still focuses mainly on identifying and growing monocultures that produce high amounts of lipids or other target compounds. However, monocultures might have a lower efficiency of utilizing resources, due to their limited physiological resource use possibilities, compared to algal polycultures. Recent studies showed that species diversity enhances the lipid production of microalgae. To identify the general patterns of enhanced lipid production in diverse microalgal communities it is essential to investigate links between resource use complementarity and the corresponding lipid production. Cyanobacteria and Chlorophyta are highly differentiated in their light spectrum utilization and nutrient requirements, e.g., some Cyanobacteria species can fix atmospheric nitrogen. To investigate whether these two groups are complementary in terms of optimizing biomass and neutral lipid production, we compared the growth of several species of Cyanobacteria and Chlorophyta in monocultures and polycultures consisting of species from both groups. Results show that lipid production increases with increasing functional diversity and that using just two different functional groups of microalgae provides a positive biodiversity effect. Lipid yields were particularly enhanced by the presence of a nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium. Additionally, lipid yields were decoupled from higher biomass production in diverse communities. In summary, our results show that the enhancement of lipid production due to biodiversity can be achieved through combining just two physiologically different taxonomic groups and including a nitrogen fixer. This may make achieving the benefits of biodiversity in algal mass cultivation more straightforward.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Biologie > Department Biologie II
• Themengebiete: 500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik > 570 Biowissenschaften; Biologie
• ISSN: 2211-9264
• Sprache: Englisch