POTENSI MIKROALGA SEBAGAI SUMBER BIOMASA DAN PENGEMBANGAN PRODUK TURUNANNYA

Abstract

The first use of microalgae by humans as food detected in the dates back 2000 years, but the development of
biotechnology of microalgae just began in the middle of this century. Microalgae refer to biomass resource
contain many useful components such as protein, carbohydrate, fatty acid, etc. Products based microalgae are
diverse from human food and nutrition, animal feed and nutrition up to fine chemicals such as triglycerides
which is able to be converted to biodiesel. Microalgae is a promising biomass resources, (i) microalgae is
renewable resources which has high biodiversity properties, (ii) production cost of converting process from
microalgae biomass into its derivatives relatively low, (iii) product derivatives of microalgae have a high
demand in market. Based on above, microalgae can be developed further to be applied as raw material for food,
energy and pharmacy. This paper described microalgae in general and the developing technology used to
produce commercial microalgae based product.