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Assessment of Triacylglycerol Content in Chlorella vulgaris Cultivated in a Two-Stage Process
Raquel R dos Santos1*, Claudete N Kunigami2, Donato AG Aranda3 and Cláudia MLL Teixeira11Divisão de Energia, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia, 20081-312 Rio de Janeiro - RJ, Brazil
2Divisão de Química Analítica, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia, 20081-312 Rio de Janeiro - RJ, Brazil
3Departamento de Engenharia Química, Escola de Química, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 21941-590 Rio de Janeiro - RJ, Brazil
- Corresponding Author:
- Raquel R dos Santos
Divisão de Energia
Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia
Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro 20081-312, Brazil
Tel: 55 21 996574980
E-mail: raquel.c.rezende@gmail.com
Received date: October 15, 2015; Accepted date: November 30, 2015; Published date: December 07, 2015
Citation: dos Santos RR, Kunigami CN, Aranda DAG, Teixeira CMLL (2015) Assessment of Triacylglycerol Content in Chlorella vulgaris Cultivated in a Two- Stage Process. J Biotechnol Biomater 5:212. doi:10.4172/2155-952X.1000212
Copyright: © 2015 dos Santos RR, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Chlorella vulgaris cultivation in two-stage process was applied to increase the lipid productivity without compromising the biomass productivity. At the first stage the microalgae was cultivated under nutrient-sufficient conditions to obtain a maximized cell density, at the second stage the nitrate conditions are changed to trigger the accumulation of TAG. During the first stage, the maximum biomass productivity (0.032 g.L-1.d-1) was observed after 13 days under nutrient-sufficient conditions with 1.21 g.L-1 NaNO3 and 0.00449 g.L-1 K2HPO4. The maximum lipid content (25.4%), lipid productivity (7.5 mg.L-1.d-1) and TAGs content in total lipids (41.3%) were favored by the nitrogen-starvation conditions for more 4 days, at the second stage. The oil extracted at the second stage contained lower percentage of PUFAs being more suitable for the production of biodiesel when compared with the oil extracted at the first stage. This two-stage phototrophic process is promising to provide a more efficient way for large-scale production of algal biomass and biodiesel production.
