A group of researchers has used genetic engineering to promote the use of algae in the field of medicine, achieving excellent results.
The shamans and druids of the tribes used a wide variety of plant species to treat ills that affected the rest of the group. In settlements near the sea, river or lakes, the algae could not be lacking as part of those ingredients to treat (or try) different diseases. Thanks to its active ingredients, some of the natural remedies managed to contain the symptoms but they were quickly left to naturalists at the start of the great era of synthetic drugs.
Algae have been and will be an interesting option to make all kinds of products for the health and development of human life, and today Omicrono ScienceWe are going to take a closer look at how the characteristics of our green friends algae have been used.
Algae are the new biofactories
However, these processes have certain limitations that affect production, the stress to which the crop is subjected, the price of substrates and yield, the price of purification, etc. For this reason, the production model emerged in bioreactors using algae, Genetically modified to be optimal for our product. In Spain this model has a special interest, since since algae need light to increase their biomass (through photosynthesis), it does not hurt to arrange these bioreactors in regions with many hours of light, such as Almera, where we also have large specialists in their field such as Francisco Gabriel Acin-Fernndez, who suggests a method to produce biodiesel from Microalgae what can you read in the NCBI.
Taking advantage of the lipids that are in the microalgae to produce biofuels is not the only application that this clean source of ideas has, but it can also be used as a factor of other products that may have interest in health.
Using algae to fight cancer, and many more diseases
Substances that are really expensive to make in the laboratory, become really simple and inexpensive to produce using the microalgae-based system.
An example is Taxol, a drug used to treat cancer obtained from black yew (Taxus bacatta) of the bark, and whose processing is really expensive, thus affecting the price of treatment. Using the genetically modified algae model we can produce this drug infamously cheaper.
A technology that exploits the potential that mystics used to use and that leaves us with a wide variety of applications and a very promising future.
