Nowadays, more than 30,000 microalgae are known although citations are found reporting the existence of 200,000 to several million, of which only about 11,000 are kept in culture strains belonging to a total of 3,000 species.

There is much to unravel and a long way to go...

As with any collection of microalgae - seaweed collection - the main objective is to maintain the cultures in good conditions as well as to expand the collection by collecting, isolating, identifying and maintaining new strains.

Alga₂O created in 2012, had 1000 cultures of microalgae, but since then and until 2016, expanded its collection with about 400 new strains which do not exist in any other collection of microalgae.