Summary The production of microalgae represents a large and rapidly expanding market with several applications in the fields of food, pharmaceutics, cosmetics, and energy. Microalgae are photosynthetic aquatic microorganisms whose growth is mainly controlled by a few environmental parameters: temperature, light, pH, and nutrient availability. For this reason, monitoring and controlling such parameters is crucial for their production. At the same time, the development of mathematical models to simulate the behavior of biological systems has become a major predictive and control tool of production processes. In this paper, we present an Internet of Things (IoT) system that can couple sensor data collected directly by biotechnological cultivations with a predictive simulation model. The IoT system constitutes the core of a Decision Support System developed to help the end‐user in the management of industrial production processes.

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Microalgae cultivation is an emerging and interesting field with an increasing market and with Great prospects for the future both in the food, pharmaceutical, cosmetic and energetic field as well as for other new applications. Microalgae are photosynthetic aquatic microorganism which growth is regulated in-primis by light, temperature, pH and nutrients availability. The monitoring and control of these parameters is crucial in Microalgae cultivation plants because it allows to increase the production and the quality of microalgae biomass feedstock and to prevent the critical conditions for the culture which can compromise the cultivation.\ud \ud In the present work, we present an affordable and easy to use application of Internet of Things (IoT) for the monitoring and control of a microalgae cultivation coupled with a biological modeling for Decision Support System (DSS) to the operator for managing a plant sited in Southern Italy

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the impact of turbulence on aquatic organisms. In response to this interest, a novel instrument has been constructed, TURBOGEN, that generates turbulence in water volumes up to 13 l. TURBOGEN is fully computer controlled, thus, allowing for a high level of reproducibility and for variations of the intensity and characteristics of turbulence during the experiment. The calibration tests, carried out by particle image velocimetry, showed TURBOGEN to be successful in generating isotropic turbulence at the typical relatively low levels of the marine environment. TURBOGEN and its sizing have been devised with the long-term scope of analyzing in detail the molecular responses of plankton to different mixing regimes, which is of great importance in both environmental and biotechnological processes.

Lettuce plants were grown in a greenhouse affected by the fungal pathogen Fusarium oxysporum to test the effects on plant metabolomics by different organic treatments. Three foliar application treatments were applied: a commercial compost tea made of aerobically fermented plant organic matter, a pure lyophilized microalga Artrospira platensis, commonly named spirulina, and the same microalga previously exposed during its culture to a natural uptake from medium enriched with F. oxysporum fragmented DNA (NAT). The experiment is the first attempt to observe in field conditions, the use and effects of a natural microbial library as a carrier of pathogenic fungal DNA for disease control. Untargeted NMR metabolomics and chemometrics showed that foliar organic application significantly reduced fumaric and formic acids, aromatic amino acids, and nucleosides, while increasing ethanolamine. A strong decrease in phenolic acids and an increase in citric acid and glutamine were specifically observed in the NAT treatment. It is noteworthy that the exposure of a known biostimulant microalga to fungal DNA in its culture medium was sufficient to induce detectable changes in the metabolomic profiles of the fertilized plants. These findings deserve further investigation to assess the potential relevance of the presented approach in the field of crop biostimulation and biocontrol of plant pathogens.

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