Purify Chlorella Sample - (Nov/14/2010 )

This is probably a very simplistic question for most of the people on this board. I'm doing this for a hobby, and I've tried to Google my question many times with no luck. When I google "purify chlorella" I get a bunch of dietary supplement websites (NOT my goal). As a last resort, I'm turning to you guys for help. Apologies in advance for the layman question.

I have been playing around with some chlorella samples I collected from a nearby river for about a year. I have successfully been able to increase cell counts, etc. But my water is infested with all manner of bugs that eat my chlorella. They came from the river, and are fun to watch under the microscope, but I can't trust any experiments I'm doing if my cells are being consumed.

I'm sure there are ways to purify the sample (or at least substantially reduce the number of bugs).

Keep in mind, I am doing this for fun, so I don't have thousands of dollars to put into it.

I've thought of raising or lowering pH; raising salinity; increasing nitrates to toxic levels, etc. But I have no idea if doing that stuff would be effective or even how to achieve it without causing other problems.

If there is an online resource anyone could suggest that I could read about purifying these samples, I'd really appreciate it.

Its difficult if you do not have the correct material etc.. but check this link: http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/biosci/Culturing_Chlorella_156KB.pdf


Just ignore the fermentor stuff etc.. but you might want to try to make the BBM medium... it is a medium pro Chlorella and it will inhibit some bacteria etc..

Offcourse you will never get it 100% clean, but it might help.

You could aslo try to boil water, use tap water, boil it so that nothing "bad" stays in it and then tranfser a very diluted sample of you chlorella in it.. with some extra nutrients..

The more you dilute, the more you dilute not only chlorella but also the "bad" bacteria...
You only need a few Chlorealla to start..

BTW. why are you doing this? Just for the fun of it or?

pito on Sun Nov 14 18:47:38 2010 said:

Thanks for the reading suggestion. I'll give it a try.

I got into the microbiology hobby by brewing beer. Now I'm interested in bio-fuels. I've been playing around with it for a while; mostly proving to myself how difficult it is .

I've successfully made both bio-diesel and ethanol (uh, no worries, I was working with someone who had a permit and a fire extinguisher). But I was using store-bought vegetable oil and corn sugar for that. Those are very straight-forward processes. So now I'm interested in generating the feedstock in a way that doesn't require growing corn!

It's just a hobby for me, but it's an interesting one because the product is useful.

Well good luck with it.
Make sure to boil the nutrients too to remove all bacteria etc..

However it will always be hard for you to work aseptically...
But you can try to reduce the contamination as much as possible.

Buy what are you going to do wih the chlorella? Make biofuel out of it?

I was thinking you where growing it to eat it..