abstract
As a promising source of biodiesel, Chlorella has drawn more and more attention of
researcher, while rapid screening of enhanced lipid production becomes essential. Here we
investigated lyophilized alga powders as the starting material and optimized Nile red
method for quantitative measurement of neutral lipids in Chlorella with a high correlation
coefficient (R2 ¼ 0.99) between gravimetric and spectrofluorimetric quantification. Using
this method, Chlorella vulgaris were screened out of several Chlorella strains with the
highest lipid content and orthogonal design experiments were performed to search for the
significant factors affecting lipid accumulation. Our data implied that the sensitivity and
versatility enable this method a useful tool in optimizing culture and accumulation
condition of lipid production in alga and figured out several factors significantly influenced
lipid production in C. vulgaris.