Professor Meng-Chou Lee from National Taiwan Ocean University and Home Algae Biotech Co., Ltd. exhibited the production of phycoerythrin using the "fish–algae symbiosis system" at the 2019 Asia Biotechnology Exhibition. This new system was employed to improve the water efficiency of aquaculture and increase the production volume per water unit by utilizing algae as a biological filter that can effectively absorb ammonia and nitrogen in the aquaculture environment, thereby enhancing water resource reuse while maintaining great growth rate for algae. This system helps reduce the carbon emission during aquaculture, and the algal body within the system can also serve as a renewable raw material for applications in other industries.
The high-protein contents of our red algae have also been utilized for substitutes in part of daily aquatic feed made of fish powder. Our short-term feeding experiments on white shrimps demonstrated that the new aquatic feed helped enhance non-specific immune response of white shrimps and improve their resistance to white spot virus.
Further, our Taiwan-exclusive Rhodophyta species have also been exploited for extraction of high-value fluorescent phycobiliproteins (PBPs) that can be used for fluorescent labeling in R&D and medical examination reagents. Importantly, the high unit values and superior quality of our major PBP product, R-phycoerythrin (R-PE), have rendered it become a core product of our company. Scientific literature have also indicated R-PE possesses biological activities such as anti-oxidation, anti-inflammation, and tumor suppression, marking another potential value in future beauty and medical product developments.
