Ammonium chloride: a novel effective and inexpensive salt solution for phycocyanin extraction from Arthrospira ( Spirulina ) platensis

Phycocyanin, a blue pigment, is a type of phycobiliproteins. Because of its various potential properties, phycocyanin is applied to various fields, such as nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, medicine, cosmetics, and biotechnological research. The cost and application of phycocyanin are highly dependent on its purity index. In this study, ammonium chloride is presented as a novel, effective, and inexpensive salt for phycocyanin extraction. Compared with sodium phosphate, which is commonly used during phycocyanin extraction process, ammonium chloride solution efficiently extracted phycocyanin with high purity from Arthrospira platensis FACHB-314. In addition, ammonium phosphate solution is also presented as an alternative precipitation agent in phycocyanin purification that may replace the widely used ammonium sulfate. Statistical analysis shows that there is no significant difference in phycocyanin concentration between crude extracts (overall mean of 0.208 and 0.215 for extraction using sodium phosphate and ammonium chloride, respectively). However, the difference in phycocyanin purity ratio (A 620 /A 280 ) between these two extractions is significant (overall mean of 0.742 and 1.428 for extraction using sodium phosphate and ammonium chloride, respectively). With ammonium chloride, the purity indexes of phycocyanin are 1.5 and 2.81 after the optimum extraction step, and precipitation used as the primary purification step, respectively. The present study describes a novel purification method to achieve phycocyanin with analytical grade without multiple purification steps.