I’m looking to setup some experiments with growing sphagnum moss in a Pioreactor.
One thing mentioned in some of the papers I’m reading is around CO2 supplementation (example):
Compared to the cultivation of S. palustre with a 30-fold biomass increase in the photobioreactor of Beike et al. (2015), precultivation of the inocula and aeration of the bioreactor with 2% CO2 shortened the cultivation time from about 30 days to 24 days with a similar biomass production of 54 ± 2 g DW out of 1.8 g DW (30-fold increase) in our study. Optimization of the standard Sphagnum medium furthermore increased the biomass production to nearly 40-fold in our study.
or this one:
Within the light fluxes of the experiment (0–1 000 μmol m–2 s–1 PAR), net CO2 exchange rates
of S. fuscum exposed to raised long-term CO2 concentrations increased by 16%–125% compared to the samples grown in the reference CO2 concentration (350 ppm) (Fig. 1). The highest increase
in the net rate of photosynthesis, about doubling at the radiation flux of 100 μmol m–2 s–1 PAR, was found for samples grown between adjacent CO2 treatment concentrations 350 and 700 ppm.
When I bought the Pioreactor, I also bought some of your peristaltic pumps at the same time as well. However, I saw this post, which mentions you shouldn’t use the peristaltic pumps for aeration (as they aren’t designed for continuous running). So it seems they might not be useful for this purpose:
My questions:
- I saw there’s a plugin for CO2 sensors here. However, how are these sensors meant to work with the Pioreactor? Are you meant to use them to sample from the Pioreactor somehow?
- If I wanted to do CO2 supplementation into a Pioreactor - how exactly would I achieve that? For example, I found this page on how you’d do it for a giant aquarium fishtank, but I’m assuming that’s a bit overkill for a tiny 40mL Pioreactor vessel. Is there an easier way you’d do it here?