Long-term monitoring of the biomass and production of lipids by Nitzschia palea for biodiesel production

Pennate diatom Nitzschia palea can be cultured in outdoor vertical-bed photobioreactors to produce biodiesel. To assess the production of biomass and lipids, non-axenic cultures of Nitzschia palea were grown outdoors, and the growth of these cultures was measured biweekly. During the annual cycle of algal culture, the culture temperature ranged from 17.3 degrees C to 33.5 degrees C, the dry weight biomass ranged from 0.11 g l(-1) to 0.25 g l(-1), light energy] ranged from 1.94 Wm(-2) to 3.9 Wm(-2) and intracellular lipid content ranged from 7.1% to 11.4% of biomass weight after drying at 60 degrees C. Gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (GC/MS) analysis of n-hexane extracts showed that the intracellular lipids were primarily C14:0 myristic acid (9.01%), C15:0 pentadecyclic acid (8.26%) and two types of C16:0, palmitic acid (41.13%) and palmitoleic acid (29.25%). Gel permeation analysis showed that carboxylic acids comprised 28.9% of lipids, 16.3% of monoglycerides, 27.3% of diglycerides and 24.3% of triglycerides. Alcoholysis of lipids resulted in the conversion of about 93.9% of fatty acids to equivalent fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) or biodiesel, which, on basis of wt%, consisted primarily of C15:0 methyl myristate (8.3%), C16:0 methyl pentadecanoate] (7.2%), C17:1 methyl palmitoleate (28.7%) and methyl palimtate](39.8%). (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).