Advances in microalgae cell wall disruption

Abstract

Microalgae cultivation shows the advantages of high photosynthesis efficiency, good environmental adaptability, fast growth, high bioproducts productivity and good environmental value, and many valuable products including astaxanthin, lutein, high-unsaturated fatty acids, lipids, etc. can accumulate in microalgae cells, so microalgae has become the focus in scientific research in recent years. Cell disruption is the key and difficult step to extract those products. Starting from discussing the cell wall structural characteristics of three species of microalgae, the current situation, trends in scientific research and technical development of cell disruption strategies including mechanical, wave-based, pyrolysis, chemical and biological methods were discussed and summarized. It is pointed out that practically the combination of chemical and mechanical methods, with chemical procedures as pretreatment and mechanical step as final disruption, can solve cell disruption problems for most microalga, and is a more feasible cell disruption industrialization technology. Prospectively, biological method is feasible economically and theoretically for most microalga because of its low energy cost and mild process conditions, and tends to be a deservable method.

Keywords

• other subjects in bioengineering; microalgae; cell wall disruption; mechanical cell lysis; non-mechanical cell lysis