Regarding P. tricornutum, all the pretreatmentmethods were shown
to extract more or less the same lipid content, around 28%, with little
improvement compared to the fresh unprocessed sample. The values
of the amount of lipid extracted from P. tricornutum were about two
times higher than that from N. gaditana and C. sorokiniana.
Finally, it has to be stressed that the steam explosion pretreatment
gave the highest lipid extraction yields for the three microalgae species
considered in this study.