In one of the buildings where I work we hold a library on liverworts that takes up an entire room of books alone. Algae is much the same. It would take you years to read through all of the literature published within those groups, and I doubt that would even be possible within our lifetime. The controlled studies are what we refer to as experimental research. They are becoming far less common now in place of field research and DNA sequencing due to the advancement in computational power, mainly because they are less accurate and offer little or no value to the knowledge pool. The Culture Collection of Algae and Protozoa is a NERC funded institute in the UK with a lot of bioinformatic data on these algae. They would be a lot more accessible than biotechnology companies, and they might be able to give you some guidance based upon the variable that you are investigating for each taxonomic group.