Is your system full-scale or lab scale? which one? Would you give me some information please?

Regards.

I am hoping to set up continuous flow through cultures in the lab, about 1L of volume. The goal is to manipulate nutrient content so the media can not proprietary.

Thank you for taking the time to think on this problem!

If your system is full scale I recommend plankton net to you. There many kind of plankton nets. Since Anabaena is filamentous algae genus and size of Microcystis not too much small (For example size of M. aeruginosa is around 2.6-5.4 µm) I think you can use plankton nets. 

For example, plankton nets are available in various sizes, width 1 m. I saw in the internet that they can be delivered at any length, minimum sale is 1 m (1 m²). 

Quality: Polyamid (Nylon PA 6.6)

Available sizes in µm:

1 - 5 - 10 - 15 - 20 - 25 - 30 -until 1000µm

Detailed information:

http://www.kc-denmark.dk/products/plankton-nets/plankton-nets-in-various-mesh-sizes.aspx

Regards

Excuse me I think there is misunderstanding. I understand that you are looking for a material for harvesting. I'm sorry about that. Nevertheless,  I may suggest any mineral medium in certain time. Good Luck.

Great, thanks the help! I will look into this.

By the way Patrick,

Since algae biomass would be intensive, you may have to use vacuum pump for seperation algae from culture liquid. You can also need filtration chamber and cut the plankton net for fitting to filtration chamber. If you don't want to try for all, you can use whatman GF/C ready made filter paper (Pore size of them is 1.1 mikronmeter).

In our laboratory we pick up colonies and filaments of cyanobacteria from nature samples using a very tin Pasteur pipette. This isolation is done under optical microscopy. After that the colonies or filaments are put in a text tube with 17mL of BG-11 medium. Our culture collection is kept iunder control conditions: BG-11 medium; 22±1 °C, light intensities 40-50 mol fótons m-2/s-1,14-10h light-dark cycle. I hope these informations can be usefull for you. Célia Sant´Anna

Dear Patrick,

This is the procedure we used for cultivating Microcystis in our lab:

'Microcystis cultures were established by picking individual colonies from live samples with a sterile micropipette under a binocular microscope. They were transferred to 24-well Repli dishes and later to 250 ml Falcon culture flasks. All strains were grown in freshwater WC medium (Guillard and Lorenzen, 1972) without pH adjustment and vitamin addition, at 24 °C, a photon flux density of ca. 120 µE m-2 s-1 and a 12h/12h light/dark regime. For long-term maintenance, the culture flasks were incubated at 18 °C, under a photon flux density of ca. 30 µE m-2 s-1 and a 12h/12 h light/dark regime, and re-inoculated approximately every month.'

We obtained good results with this method and were able to keep our cultures stable for many years.

Good luck!

Jeroen