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The Algae Needs to Sleep!
By Ally Sheller
Remember needing to pass out on the sofa after Christmas dinner to digest everything? Algae do that too. To have the most efficient photosynthesis and highest growth rate, algae like a dark period of eight hours after 16 hours of illumination every day. This allows them to take a rest from capturing sunlight and CO2 and focus on converting these products into biomass. The length of light/dark periods has an effect on the lipid content of the algae too - having a 16/8 hour split produces a higher lipid content than short cycles, which means our algae are more efficient at capturing carbon (Wang et al., 2014).
There is no significant increase in growth when algae are exposed to longer, 24 hour periods of illumination (Atta et al., 2013), which is why our experimental design features 16 hours of illumination broken up by rest periods, so us and the algae can both get some sleep.
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