The cyanobacterium Spirulina platensis has been studied due to its high content (~65%) of highly digestible protein as well as significant amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids, phenolics, vitamins, minerals and phycocyanin which could be useful in the human nutrition. The use of nutrients of low costs in the cyanobacterium growth could reduce the costs of production. We studied the fed-batch mixotrophic growth of the S. platensis in Zarrouk's medium with glucose (0.5 gL-1 and 1.0 gL-1) as carbon source and also investigated the effects of dilution (50% and 75%, with water) and illumination (1,800 lux and 3,000 lux) using a 2³ factorial design. The maximum celular concentration of 5.38 gL-1 and maximum specific growth rate of 0.0063 h-1 were obtained with a glucose concentration of 0.5 gL-1, 50% dilution and 1800 lux of illuminance.
Biomass; glucose; illuminance; mixotrophic; Spirulina platensis
