Importance of Algae

Serena Cuoghi
Title of Professor of Biology

A growing interest revolves around the kingdom made up of algae; These plant organisms, although they are not properly considered part of the plant kingdom, prove to be increasingly important among us, and it is that these multicellular structures They are conquering the world with their extraordinary benefits, allowing great advances in the following fields: 1) cosmetics, with application in all kinds of creams, lotions and potions; 2) the pharmaceutical industry, with products ranging from nutritional supplements to the development of antiviral vaccines; 3) food, both human and animal, and 4) scientific research, which always finds new ways and reasons to take advantage of algae in the generation of new knowledge, either about themselves or about the contributions they provide in everything the rest.

sources of nutrients under the sea

For most Asian countries, especially in areas close to the coasts, it is already an ancient custom to use algae as a source of food. food, having even managed to develop an incredibly wide variety of dishes, where they are used from their simplest use as edible wrapper for other foods such as rice, to much more complex recipes where seaweed is the main ingredient, due to the high amount of nutrients that they can provide in the diet, a fact that has progressively spread to the rest of humanity, with wide acceptance, and also being incorporated into foods that are also processed for animals raised on farms and more recently for their own pets at home

The elaboration of organic products for the fertilization of soils in crops is another resource of recent data for which algae are being used as the main base and with very promising results, potentially reducing the production and use of the most harmful agrochemicals and thereby stimulating the proliferation of farms to grow their own algae, as a great business with which to sustain all the production models that have been strengthened, thanks to the use of the nutrients that algae reserve among their cells.

industrial use

Elements of great industrial application are obtained from the algae, such as occurs with agar, which is used both in the preparation of jellies edibles by companies that manufacture sweets and sweets, as well as by pharmaceutical corporations for the production of capsules with which some are dosed medicines.

Agar also serves as the basis for the preparation of in vitro culture media used in an innumerable number of lines of research and scientific procedures, and even for the controlled germination of various plants for ornamental purposes and also for food, a use that already has a long historical tradition among many of the farmers in the world and in which each one has been developing their own formulas, depending on the natural elements available in the environment and the needs of the species to cultivate, being able to do it both in an artisanal way and on a large scale, demonstrating the versatility that algae have to make life much easier in more than one task.

Oxygenation of the waters

The importance of algae at an ecological level goes beyond the fact that they serve as food for a wide variety of marine animals. Most algae are capable of producing photosynthesis and thereby generating a large supply of oxygen in the water, contributing to the balance of the composition. chemistry and helping to maintain the pH of oceans, rivers and lakes, as well as providing part of the molecular oxygen that is released from the oceans into the atmosphere.

The reduction of the algae population, therefore, would be the marine equivalent of deforestation on the terrestrial surface, however, the capacity that algae are demonstrating to have on the processing and decomposition of some polluting substances, as well as the interest in their large-scale cultivation, turn out to be a source of hope that points towards the implementation of some solutions that can contribute positively to reverse the effects of pollution, product of human activities and the consequent climate change experienced by the planet.

References

Ibáñez, E., & Guerrero, M. (2017). The algae we eat (Vol. 81). The books of the cataract. Madrid Spain.

Ortega, M. M., Godinez, J. L., & Solórzano, G. g. (2001). Catalog of benthic algae from the Mexican coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea (Vol. 34). UNAM. Mexico.

Salamanca, E. J. Q. (2005). Algae as indicators of contamination. Valley University. Colombia.