Safety in Algae Home Experiments

JimmyBuckets a day ago | parent | next [-]

What a beautiful world we live in! I love how niche this is (to me). Devotion is such a wonderful thing to behold. I had never even thought of thinking about the relative risks of growing algae strains until this moment. Thanks for sharing!

▲

imglorp 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm a little more interested in cultivating utility algae, for food or other purposes. Hopefully those, too are not dangerous in a home setup?

	▲	adrian_b 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Those are utility algae. E.g. Chlorella is grown as a source of protein. You can buy Chlorella protein powder for human consumption, from various suppliers. Chlorella has also been used as source of oxygen in enclosed spaces. The other mentioned algae have also been proposed for such uses. There was a time when it was believed that Chlorella could become a major source of protein, due to its very high content of protein, but eventually it was concluded that modern agriculture ensures that proteins from legumes, e.g. from soy, pea or fava bean, are cheaper, because Chlorella would need an expensive processing to make it easily digestible, by destroying the cell walls, and also high productivity is conditioned by being able to provide excess carbon dioxide in the water. For food, growing Spirulina (a blue-green alga, a.k.a. cyanobacterium) is easier than growing Chlorella (a green alga with cellulose cell walls), due to simpler post-processing.

▲

abletonlive a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

a sliver of context would be nice. the substack just drops right into evaluating safety for algae. but why? i have a reef tank so I know how dangerous dinoflagellates and other microorganisms can be, but you drop readers in with no context to any of this and just show yourself prompting llms to ask how dangerous they are. I feel like someone picked a random page out of their journal and posted it here.

	▲	ehnto a day ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think the author posted it here. I do enjoy more personal interactions and writing online, like how old blogs used to be. There is a certain clean "voice" and standard story flow so many articles have today that just feel like corporate presentations, I get quite tired of it. I recall a recent article where some enthusiast was swearing and being a bit flippant in their article, it got highly criticised even though the topic matter was excellent and deep. There's room in the world for some people to be a bit rough around the edges.

▲

whycombinetor 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>"The second risk is that the sample isn't completely pure. As with any biological sample, it's hard to avoid contamination. It's likely that other bacteria or organisms might be present in the sample. And so we have secondary risks from other organisms coinciding with the sample. At the moment, this is the biggest risk but I still think it's low. The evaluation of such risks will be dedicated to a different blogpost."

So this article titled "Safety in Algae Home Experiments" completely omits evaluating the "biggest risk".

Unless you're growing black dot mold for citric acid or something, the culture you're _intentionally_ trying to cultivate is generally not going to be the problem - the problem will be what you're cultivating that you _didn't_ intend to cultivate. It's the same with mycoculture. If you do not know what is inside the container you are opening, you may end up with a face full of trichoderma spores.

Stay safe and do not play around with contam, folks. Not even once.

▲

a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]