Role of microalgae and cyanobacteria in wastewater treatment: genetic engineering and omics approaches

Microalgae have recently attracted considerable interest worldwide, due to their extensive application potential in the renewable energy, biopharmaceutical, and nutraceutical industries. Microalgae are renewable, sustainable, and economical sources of biofuels, bioactive medicinal products, and food ingredients. Several microalgae species have been investigated for their potential as value-added products with remarkable pharmacological and biological qualities. As biofuels, they are a perfect substitute to liquid fossil fuels with respect to cost, renewability, and environmental concerns. Microalgae have a significant ability to convert atmospheric CO2 to useful products such as carbohydrates, lipids, and other bioactive metabolites. Although microalgae are feasible sources for bioenergy and biopharmaceuticals in general, some limitations and challenges remain, which must be overcome to upgrade the technology from pilot-phase to industrial level. The most challenging and crucial issues are enhancing microalgae growth rate and product synthesis, dewatering algae culture for biomass production, pretreating biomass, and optimizing the fermentation process in case of algal bioethanol production. The present review describes the advantages of microalgae for the production of biofuels and various bioactive compounds and discusses culturing parameters.

This review analyzes the current state of a specific niche of microalgae cultivation; heterotrophic growth in the dark supported by a carbon source replacing the traditional support of light energy. This unique ability of essentially photosynthetic microorganisms is shared by several species of microalgae. Where possible, heterotrophic growth overcomes major limitations of producing useful products from microalgae: dependency on light which significantly complicates the process, increase costs, and reduced production of potentially useful products. As a general role, and in most cases, heterotrophic cultivation is far cheaper, simpler to construct facilities, and easier than autotrophic cultivation to maintain on a large scale. This capacity allows expansion of useful applications from diverse species that is now very limited as a result of elevated costs of autotrophy; consequently, exploitation of microalgae is restricted to small volume of high-value products. Heterotrophic cultivation may allow large volume applications such as wastewater treatment combined, or separated, with production of biofuels. In this review, we present a general perspective of the field, describing the specific cellular metabolisms involved and the best-known examples from the literature and analyze the prospect of potential products from heterotrophic cultures. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.