Incorporate in a consortium as partner

The University of Almeria is a public institution of higher education created by Law 3/93, of 1 July (State Official Gazette No. 202 of 24 August 1993). The University of Almería is created and designed to effectively and efficiently exercise a quality teaching and research function that contributes to the economic and social development of its environment through the transfer of knowledge.
The Marine Microalgae Research Group (BIO173) has proven experience in the manufacture of technology for microalgae biomass production and compounds extraction for very diverse purposes.
Examples of projects coordinated by our group with marine microalgae, where large quantities of biomass have been required, are the two unique European projects: EPALMAR (contract no: BRPR970537, hundreds of kg of biomass/year, for high value products as PUFAs) and, more recently, the SABANA project (ID 727874, H2020-BG-2016-2017/H2020-bg-2016-1; Crosscutting marine and maritime research, 2016- 2020; oriented to the markets of aquaculture and agriculture, in which productions of several ton/year of biomass are required) (http://www.eu-sabana.eu/).
The UAL research team (Project: CTQ2013-46552-R and, the recently awarded, RTI2018-101891-B-I00) has also studied the phenomenology of microalgae adhesion in PBRs and the thermodynamic fundamentals of surface-microalga interactions in marine environments, to be able to select construction surfaces and/or adequate coatings to control this process. To this end, a protocol has been established that has allowed us to reliably check different materials and coatings for the construction of PBRs with very different surface free energy (hydrophilic, hydrophobic and amphiphilic).
The recently awarded project entitled ‘BIO-guided MicroAlgae-based bioprocess optimization for AGR-ifood industry applications (BIOMAGRI)’ (Ref. PID2019-109476RB-C22) by the Ministry of Education and Science deals on the development of biorefineries at pilot-plant scale under the circular economy precepts for the production of phytosanitary and preservation products from marine microalgae.
UAL has a large experience on design, control, performance and assessment of photobioreactors, fluid-dynamics, mixing, O2 and CO2 mass transfer, energy dissipation, light regime modulation (control and modelling), oil-rich algae production outdoor in the following reactors: draught tube airlift (patented), horizontal and fence configuration photobioreactors (range volume: 50-35,000 liters), Flat plate and disposable reactors (outdoor-indoor). The downstream processing research covers equilibria and kinetic studies on the extraction, concentration and purification and economic assessment of microalgal oil and derivates).

Incorporation in a consortium as partner.
The Marine Microalgae Research Group has led projects directly related with the topic.
We have found several microalgae strains with very interesting activities against phytopathogenic fungi and bacteria. We have just started to check the possibility of using enriched extracts on coatings for fruits and vegetables. So these activities fall into the Topic 2.3.1 (RIA) – Assessing novel antimicrobial food packaging and coating materials to reduce food waste to improve safety in the Mediterranean food supply chain.

We have capacity of:
1. screening microalgal strains
2. culturing them at laboratory and pilot plant scale (TRL-6)
3. fractionating the biomass to obtain proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and pigments
4. generating paper coatings or supplying active extracts for generating other type of coatings
5. designing and constructing photobioreactors of different sizes with the possibility of using antifouling surfaces.

Microalgae, antimicrobial, biomass fractionation, photobioreactors