The enhanced interest in carotenoid research arises partly because of their application in the food and health industries and partly because of the necessity to find a commercially viable natural source for their mass production. The bottlenecks in finding a natural source of carotenoids which can compete with the synthetic products is the mass production of the organism that produces carotenoids, cell harvesting and extraction methods of carotenoids. The microalga Botryococcus braunii is an interesting organism for its commercial value as a rich source of carotenoids. It contains lutein as major carotenoid which is considered to be one of the beneficial carotenoids in human health applications. The current paper reviews the status of B. braunii as an alternative source of carotenoid production on the commercial scale addressing aspects like cultures of algae, factors that enhance the production and accumulation of carotenoids, cell harvesting methods, and carotenoid extraction. The paper also presents an overview of identification, characterization and structural elucidation of carotenoids from B. braunii and their bioactivity.

An aqueous protocol was developed for nattokinase purification under scalable conditions using a combination of salting out, anion exchange chromatography and ultra-filtration. The enzyme was firstly washed off from the fermented soybeans. The whole proteins were precipitated by ammonium sulfate and purified by anion exchange chromatography. The purified enzyme was finally refined by size exclusion chromatography and ultra-filtration at laboratory and industry-compatible level, respectively. There was a 476.18-fold increase in enzymatic activity with a 48.3% yield at the laboratory level and 429.75-fold increase in enzymatic activity with a 42.7% yield at the industrial-compatible scale. The protocol was universally adaptive for purifying the fibrinolytic enzymes produced by bacillus tequilensis, bacillus amyloliquefaciens, and bacillus cereus, showing a purification efficiency of 329.76-fold with 42.7% yield, 221.78-fold with 32.5% yield, and 288.56-fold with 38.7% yield, respectively. All procedures are scalable, aqueous, simple, cost-effective, and suitable for fibrinolytic enzymes industrial production.