How does the race to make algae do tasks for us undermine the ability of those algae to perform their metabolic tasks?
My colleagues and I have a new article out looking at the limits of enclosed ecosystems (lab controlled algae breeding for energy/food/oil, etc). Algae live in consortia and need communities of different organisms to flourish.
How can we design our bioreactors to be more interspecies ecosystems rather than sterile systems, in order to reduce the energy use and inputs for algal photobioreactor (PBR) systems?
Our article discusses this exciting new frontier.
Sergio Mugnai, Natalia Derossi & Yogi Hendlin (2023) Algae communication, conspecific and interspecific: the concepts of phycosphere and algal-bacteria consortia in a photobioreactor (PBR), Plant Signaling & Behavior, 18:1, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15592324.2022.2148371
