Simultaneous assay of pigments, carbohydrates, proteins and lipids in microalgae

Biochemical compositional analysis of microbial biomass is a useful tool that can provide insight into the behaviour of an organism and its adaptational response to changes in its environment. To some extent, it reflects the physiological and metabolic status of the organism. Conventional methods to estimate biochemical composition often employ different sample pretreatment strategies and analytical steps for analysing each major component, such as total proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids, making it labour-, time- and sample-intensive. Such analyses when carried out individually can also result in uncertainties of estimates as different pre-treatment or extraction conditions are employed for each of the component estimations and these are not necessarily standardised for the organism, resulting in observations that are not easy to compare within the experimental set-up or between laboratories. We recently reported a method to estimate total lipids in microalgae (Chen, Vaidyanathan, Anal. Chim. Acta, 724, 67-72). Here, we propose a unified method for the simultaneous estimation of the principal biological components, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, chlorophyll and carotenoids, in a single microalgae culture sample that incorporates the earlier published lipid assay. The proposed methodology adopts an alternative strategy for pigment assay that has a high sensitivity. The unified assay is shown to conserve sample (by 79%), time (67%), chemicals (34%) and energy (58%) when compared to the corresponding assay for each component, carried out individually on different samples. The method can also be applied to other microorganisms, especially those with recalcitrant cell walls.