Electric pulsed field to extract protein from microalgae

What is it about?

Microalgae constitute a source of valuable compounds (HVM) used in health, biofuels and wellbeing. The current technologies to obtain HVM require harvesting microalga cultures and costly downstream processes steps (drying, extraction, purification). These steps are destructive to the microalgal biomass, which should be continuously renewed. Also, they generate waste residues. Here electric pulsed fields is proposed as an alternative process to extract proteins from green microalgae

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Why is it important?

A critical assessment of downstream processes reveals a number of important technical and economic challenges such as alga dewatering, solvent extraction and finally purification that generate waste residues. These processes are at odd of the opinion polls that militate for an increase of the industrial process sustainability. Alternative extraction methods such as pulsed electric field should developped to improve the the sustainability of the blue biotechnologies.