Comparison of fatty acid analysis methods for assessing biorefinery applicability of wastewater cultivated microalgae.

In this study, we compared the performances of four different gas chromatography (GC) based microalgal fatty acid analysis methods that are typically applied to biorefinery research using wastewater-adapted microalgae. Compared with the HP-5-type non-polar column, WAX-type polar columns exhibited excellent abilities to quantitatively separate C(16)-C(18) polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) from selected wastewater-adapted microalgae (Chlorella vulgaris, Ankistrodesmus gracilis and Scenedesmus quadricauda) isolates. GC-mass spectroscopy (MS) using the WAX-type polar column provided the strongest detection sensitivity among the tested methods by lowest detection limit, and GC-flame ionized detector (FID) with the same polar column exhibited nearly consistent results to GC-MS analysis.