Hi,
I want to know whether the freshwater algae gives higher yield than salt water algae. Anyone have practical experience?

You might find this page @ Oilgae useful

I guess the tolerance to saline environment has nothing to do with oil yield of the strain...there are high oil yielding strains available for both freshwater and saltwater..Nutrients plays the major role here..

It would be a serious step forward should you locate a salt water strain with high lipid content, as sea water is free and packed with nitrates it completely eliminates the need to add third party nutrients. However, you would need to treat the sea water and the strain would need to be resistent to contamination. Personally, I believe Hybrid strains are the answer to large scale salt water oil production.

Hi there,
My friends and I are doing a science fair project on algae biofuels. But first we want to purchase a species of algae online. Could you
suggest the best possible species, that produces a good amount of oil, and can reproduce quickly. We also would like to know the best way to extract it. Since we are high school students, we do not have sophisticated equipment. We research on you website and found that with the equipment we have we can only extract using the chemical solvent method, since we have no access to a oil press. Also I want to know if it possible to use a centrifuge to extract the oil after dying up the and blending (using a blended) algae.

Thank you for your time, looking forward to your reply.

Mike wrote:My friends and I are doing a science fair project on algae biofuels. But first we want to purchase a species of algae online. Could you suggest the best possible species, that produces a good amount of oil, and can reproduce quickly

By far Botyrococcus braunii is known to have high oil content (40 - 50 %) but it grows slowly. Other strains such as
Scenedesmus dimorphus, Neochloris oleoabundans can grow quickly with considerable amount of oil in it (20 - 30%).

Mike wrote:we can only extract using the chemical solvent method, since we have no access to a oil press. Also I want to know if it possible to use a centrifuge to extract the oil after dying up the and blending (using a blended) algae.

For extracting oil from algae, you can go for Hexane solvent extraction method. Centrifuge is only used to separate algae from water. In extraction,there are two phases involved: breaking algal cell wall and separating oil out. Centrifugation can only be used for the later ie., to separate the oil out. Centrifugation can be done only after breaking the cell wall by either Osmotic shock, ultrasonication or similar methods.

Hope this helps.

Can anybody tell me what this is saying?:)


From Wikipedia:
Osmotic shock or osmotic stress is a sudden change in the solute concentration around a cell, causing a rapid change in the movement of water across its cell membrane. Under conditions of high concentrations of either salts, substrates or any solute in the supernatant, water is drawn out of the cells through osmosis. This also inhibits the transport of substrates and cofactors into the cell thus “shocking” the cell. Alternatively, at low concentrations of solutes, water enters the cell in large amounts, causing it to swell and either burst or undergo apoptosis.[1]

All organisms have mechanisms to respond to osmotic shock, with sensors and signal transduction networks providing information to the cell about the osmolarity of its surroundings,[2] these signals activate responses to deal with extreme conditions.[3] Although single-celled organisms are more vulnerable to osmotic shock, since they are directly exposed to their environment, cells in large animals such as mammals still suffer these stresses under some conditions.[4]

Calcium acts as one of the primary regulators of osmotic stress. Intracellular calcium levels rise during hypo-osmotic and hyper-osmotic stresses. During hyper-osmotic stress extracellular albumin binds calcium.
Contents

hogg wrote:Can anybody tell me what this is saying?:)

From Wikipedia:
Osmotic shock or osmotic stress is a sudden change in the solute concentration around a cell, causing a rapid change in the movement of water across its cell membrane. ... Alternatively, at low concentrations of solutes, water enters the cell in large amounts, causing it to swell and either burst ...

For me, this means that with some marine species of algae, if you remove them from seawater and plop them into fresh water, they will swell and burst open. For my purposes, that would allow the oil to be extracted easily.

There is a bunch more that from an algaeoleum standpoint doesn't mean a whole lot to me. So am I missing anything here folks?

We have two kinds of people on this site.
The Chemists who speak Chemical terms.
And the laymen who want to make this work.
We need a meeting of the two using the lower level language of the Laymen, or suggestions from the Chemists on how to do what those 'smoke n mirrors' words mean!