Wellcome at
Algae4U
Living Spirulina for you!
This page gives you everything you need to grow your own spirulina culture. Here you will find growing instructions, links to the starter culture, and a recipe for mixing the nutrient medium.
What is Spirulina?
Spirulina belongs to the family of cyanobacteria and is therefore strictly speaking not an alga. There are many subspecies of Spirulina, I sell starter kits for Arthrospira platensis. These can have a spiral shape or be straight. This depends on the exact strain. The Spirulina from my starter set is linear, as it is typical for some strains from South America [1]. The filaments, which can be seen with the naked eye, exist as an accumulation of many individual cells. Similar filaments have already been found in rock layers that are more than three million years old. From this, it is concluded that similar cyanobacteria have contributed substantially to the formation of oxygen in our atmosphere. [2].
Microscope image of Spirulina Arthrospira Platensis from my starter kit.
Example of spiral Arthrospira platensis. FarmerOnMars, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
What is Spirulina good for?
As a dietary supplement
Perdita at the English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
As food
Spirulina contains many nutrients in a particularly concentrated form and is therefore often used as a food supplement. Thus, on the one hand, it has been used for centuries by primitive peoples to enrich food [3] but on the other hand also researched by NASA as a supplement for astronauts
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