SEAWEED CULTIVATION: A NEW APPLIED FIELD FOR BIOTECHNOLOGY

Seaweeds cultivation has resulted in great achievements, although it has a history of only a few decades. With higher productivity and resulting higher profit, it has become the leading marine exploitation industry with the brightest prospects. The relatively limited species introduced for commercial cultivation showed great biological diversity. Introduction of selected good strains for traditional cultivation and the transformation from cultivation of mixed strains to that of pure cell lines are two certain tendencies in the future. Pure line cultivation of seaweeds in a sort of advanced biotechnology. It provides new opportunities for not only the industry itself, but also the stable market of high quality natural marine products. More work should be done on principles and methods to obtain optimal results from the combination of pure line cultivation techniques with advanced biochemistry. The programmed batch production of fine chemicals such as polysaccharides and proteins will probably become the social demand.