and were resuspended in 10 ml culture media. An aliquot of the suspension was used for the determination of cell number, and the remainder of the cell suspension was rinsed with PBS and suspended in 2 ml water/ethanol (1:1, v/v). The cellular astaxanthin was extracted three times with methanol/DCM (1:1, v/v) and quantified by HPLC (Anarjan et al., 2011).