ABSTRACT
Botryococcus braunii is a unique colonial green microalga and a great potential renewable resource of liquid fuel because of its ability to produce lipids. Due to the dense cell colonies and rigidly thick cell wall of B. braunii, the traditional Nile red method is usually of low sensitivity and bad repeatability and hard for the determination of lipid content in the cells. By dispersing the colony with ultrasonic, assisting permeation of Nile red across the cell wall with dimethyl sulfoxide and optimizing the staining conditions, we established an improved detection method. The details were as follows: after the colonial algal sample was treated by ultrasonic at 20 kHz for 20 s, 100 W transmitting power and with 1 s on/1 s off intermittent cycle, the equivoluminal 15% (V/V) dimethyl sulfoxide and 3 microg/mL Nile red were successively added and mixed evenly, then the staining system was incubated in dark at 40 degrees C for 10 min, and subsequently was measured by fluorescence spectroscopy detection with an excitation wavelength of 490 nm. Compared with the traditional method, the improved one not only had higher detection sensitivity which was increased by 196.6%, but also had obviously better detection repeatability whose characteristic parameter - relative standard deviation (RSD) was decreased from 10.91% to 1.84%. Therefore, the improved method could provide a rapid and sensitive detection of lipid content for B. braunii breeding and cultivation.