review · Bioresources and Bioprocessing
Spirulina is a nutrient-dense cyanobacterium with potential to address global challenges in food security, medicine, energy, and environmental pollution. Its biomass contains proteins, vitamins, minerals, and bioactive compounds, including beta-carotene and phycocyanin, which offer antioxidant, anticancer, anti-diabetic, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory properties for dietary and therapeutic supplements. Because of its fast growth rate and essential fatty acids, it also serves as a prospective feedstock for biodiesel production. Furthermore, the material possesses high porosity and functional groups that provide biosorption capabilities for soil and wastewater remediation. Its chemical structure supports the synthesis of biotemplates for nanomaterials and the production of functional composites. Evaluating the biomass across these sectors highlights its eco-friendliness, economic viability, operational challenges, and prospects for sustainable deployment across nutraceutical, therapeutic, energy, and environmental sectors.
Population growth creates urgent demands for sustainable resources in food, healthcare, clean energy, and pollution management. Cyanobacteria such as Spirulina present a multifunctional biological alternative capable of yielding nutritional supplements, medical therapies, renewable biofuels, and environmental clean-up solutions. Understanding the economic and operational aspects of its biomass aids in developing cleaner, bio-based approaches to pressing global supply and remediation needs.
The findings point to applications across nutraceutical manufacturing, therapeutic development, renewable fuel refining, and wastewater treatment. Target users include dietary supplement makers, pharmaceutical developers, biofuel producers, and remediation service providers. Because the work synthesises broad potentials, economic viability, and associated challenges rather than presenting a single validated product, real-world deployment across these diverse sectors appears to be at an early stage that requires overcoming specific technical and processing hurdles.
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Global population growth underlies the need to explore alternative materials to address pressing challenges in food security, medicine, energy, and environmental pollution. Spirulina is a nutrient dense cyanobacteria that offers promising solutions to the aforementioned challenges, mainly due to its rich composition of proteins, vitamins, minerals, and bioactive compounds such as β-carotene and phycocyanin. These compounds confer various health benefits, including antioxidant, anticancer, anti-diabetic, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory properties, which make Spirulina a valuable dietary and therapeutic supplement. Essential fatty acids and its rapid growth rate also makes Spirulina a potential source of biodiesel for energy related applications. Additionally, Spirulina's high porosity and variable functional groups endow it with remarkable biosorption properties for soil and wastewater remediation applications. The chemical structure and unique properties of Spirulina have been utilized to produce biotemplates for nanomaterials as well as the fabrication of functional composites for various applications. Thus, in this review, we have highlighted the broad potentials of Spirulina in diverse applications, emphasizing its eco-friendliness, economic viability, challenges, and the prospects of its biomass for sustainable, nutraceutical, therapeutic, energy related, and environmental applications.
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DOI: 10.1186/s40643-025-00888-3
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