I have optimized the protocol for the characterization of algae biodiesel. Can I do it with a direct sample?
i dont see why not as long as you know exactly what is in your sample.
I am not sure if this paper is helpful but this guy took a sample from a settling pond and experimented on them to see if biodiesel is attainable.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21123059
I believed its this paper, i read several from Wahlen.
Our work in the area of algae has shown that the lipids become oxidized in the drying process. This may obscure the results you are looking for.
It dependents on hypotheses of the project. If you have such productive water body and you just want to know whether dose it exploitable for biofuel? Yes
If you can separate sufficient biomass in the lake water, then you can dry the lake water directly, extract the residue, and test the lipid composition by GC. But I dont think you will have so much biomass in lake water, to avoid a filtration or sedimentation for separating the water and solid. Unless you have algal mats growing on highly eutrophied areas. In this case, you can directly dry it and extract the oil.
Firstly thanks to all for your answer
@ajit ya in the lake algal mats are settled down and we can collect heavy biomass from there. That why my query was can we extract directly oil without making it pure culture
@joseph ya i am making the sample in pure culture form and meanwhile as in the lake there is high biomass so just to standardize extracting procedure.
Can we do that? or its no need
The objective of your research may vary from what I think and I am not sure if you are referring to micro or macro algae but, my suggestion: DON'T characterise for impure strains (mixed strain). Even if you do, be sure to be strain specific in a further research.
Reason: 1. It is the lazy way out
2. After characterization and necessary findings, you can't pin-point your result to one particular strain. This makes your conclusion/result unusable for necessary further research.
3. Everyone knows that microalgae will produce substantial amount of biodiesel but, not everyone knows which strain gives the highest/best lipid content. Show it in your work.
4. Probably, your focus is on characterisation of algae biodiesel; recall that you cannot effectively characterise a substance whose source is ambiguous/unclearly defined.
5. Give some meat to your work (added, meaningful value) with strain specific characterisation protocol and mixed culture characterisation protocol.
Don't forget to use a condusive drying method (temperature of less than 20 deg C recommended) - that is where many researchers lose lipid content.
I was priviledged to join a multi national team of experts to review a work on Biodiesel production from microalgae. The above issues were observed and we hope that great researchers can go a step further to clarify the algae needs of the world. All the best in your work.
I am not sure but if you are specific about a particular strain, then isolate and purify, dry the sample and do biochemical characterization
@ geethalakshmi actually i am in preliminary step just collecting sample making it pure for biochemical characterization.
Actually I am isolating the algae for pure culture but after streaking and 8 days incubation the colony is not appearing.
Not surprising. Algal mats are structured colonies. It disintegrates when the conditions that make it competitive no longer exist (as on your culture plate).
While I dont know anything about your algae and where it was collected, I would hazard a guess that your algal mat is dominated by a symbiotic consortium of a filamentous green algae with a cyanobacteria or a symbiotic consortium of filamentous cyanobacteria with a green algae.
@ajit I have collected it from near by pond and ya its filamentous and when seen under microscope it resembles more like spirogyra.
I think the simplest and quickest way to analyse is to extract most of the water, then put the slurry into an NMR tube and do FT-NMR. That should give you all the structural information about lipids etc that you require. If you have a reasonable volume of algae, split it into say 10 samples. Test each sample and identify the ones with the most (and the least) desirable characteristics. Grow new colonies from the samples with the most and least desirable characteristics and repeat the process for each characteristic. The number of repetitions needed will depend on the purity of the initial samples. You will eventually end up with relatively pure samples and can do a genotype vs phenotype analysis.
Although this might not be so related but we just been accepted a paper that we worked for 3 years on harvesting cyanobacteria and/or microalgae blooms. If so message me and I will give you the links.
thought maybe the prospects of further harvesting them in largescale in places where blooms are apparent (i.e. several lakes in South Asia, China, or the Baltic Sea, areas of the Korean peninsula) almost every year can be a good motivation
If you want to analyze biochemical composition of microalgae ,then you have to purify it and make it a single strain.after that you can say that this is biochemical composition of this strain.under mixture of strain,one can not say that which compound is belong to whom..
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