How does this research team grows clean live feed?

Through the Built In Canada Program the St. Andrews Biological Station was able to collaborate with Industrial Plankton. Listen to Shawn Robinson, Steven Neil, and Terralynn Lander discuss how the photobioreactors revolutionized the way their research team grows algae, providing an endless supply of clean live feed.

The ability to create large quantities of high quality feed has been the basis for a lot of the research. The bioreactors help produce healthy nutritious algae and create this “basically endless supply”.

Touch Screen Controls

Available at your fingertips are changes in temperature, changes in pH, you can change anything about it, even the lighting levels, which is unheard of in standard culture. You can make the culture conditions unique to the strain of algae that you are growing, which broadens the horizons for anything we want to grow. That’s just been my favourite thing, says Lander.

Ease Of Use

Steven Neil’s favourite part about the reactors: “they’re easy to use, they’re extremely user friendly. Being a technician and someone who’s cleaned tanks for many years, the cleaning cycle is fantastic”.

Bioreactor Cleaning & Scale

Lander says “cleaning alone in typical algae culture can take hours. At the end of a cycle with the bioreactor we go through a self contained cleaning cycle and it’s done! I mean the cleaning itself is just amazing. It’s kind of revolutionized the way we feed larva and grow algae. I mean I’ve never seen a system that didn’t require 20-30 steps to get it up to a volume that you can attain within weeks in this bioreactor. It opens up the possibility to do larval culture on a huge scale if you wanted it, because of the availability and the volume that you can produce, and the time it takes to produce it.”

Here is more information on the Industrial Plankton algae PBR for research.