Electroporation for microalgal biofuels: a review

Abstract

Electroporation has been widely used to increase the yield of biorefinery and biofuel production processes and promote feedstock pretreatment and microalgal cell destruction. In recent years, microscale electroporation has emerged with the potential to produce algal cell biofuels. This review reports recent advances in microscale electroporation for the development of microalgal biofuel production for the past decade. We discuss several approaches from macro to microscale electroporation that have advanced algal biotechnologies, focusing on how they enhanced the microalgal biofuel production at low cost with high cell transfection rate. Furthermore, we discuss the current challenges and future perspectives for microalgal biofuel production via microscale electroporation by specifying some examples where available.