Electronic Supplementary Material (ESI) for Green Chemistry.
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2015

Electronic Supplementary information:

Improving lipid recovery from Scenedesmus wet biomass by
surfactant-assisted disruption
YenJung Sean Lai1*, Federica De Francesco2, Alyssa Aguinaga1, Prathap
Parameswaran3*, Bruce E Rittmann1
1Swette

Center for Environmental Biotechnology, The Biodesign Institute at Arizona

State University, P.O. Box 875701, Tempe, AZ 85287-5701, USA.
2Department

of Applied Science and Technology, Politecnico di torino, Corso Duca

degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino, Italy.
3Department

of Civil Engineering, Kansas State University, 2123 Fiedler Hall,
Manhattan, KS 66506, USA

*Corresponding authors:
YenJung Sean Lai: ylai30@asu.edu
Prathap Parameswaran: prathapp@ksu.edu

The supporting information contains 6 pages, including Table S1 for the character of
different growth type of biomass, Fig S1 for the quantity of FAME under the two
different solvents, Fig S2 FAME profile via Folch and isopropanol extraction under
different surfactant treatments, Fig S3 Cell structures of protein-rich Scenedesmus
biomass under 3_DAPS, MTMA and SDS treatments, Fig S4 Cell structures of
intermediate-lipid Scenedesmus biomass under 3_DAPS, MTMA and SDS treatments,
and Fig S5 for the flow cytometer assay with SYTOX green emission.

1

Table S1 Summary of characteristic parameters of Scenedesmus biomass for the different growth conditions
Elemental composition (%)
Total FAME*
TSS
VSS
Types
(g/L)
(g/L) Carbon Hydrogen Nitrogen (% of dried biomass)
Protein-rich biomass
53
9
9
20
20
5±1
Intermediate-lipid biomass
53
9
7
23
23
6±1
High-lipid biomass
56
10
2
20
20
22 ± 3
*Total FAME obtained via direct transesterification

2

Figure S1. FAME recovery from dried biomass extraction via Folch and
isopropanol for different surfactant treatments and their respective total FAME
obtained from direct transesterification.

3

(a)

(b)

Figure S2. FAME profiles obtained via (a) Folch solvent (b) isopropanol solvent
extraction for the different surfactant treatments.

4

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

(h)

Figure S3. TEM images of protein-rich Scenedesmus biomass for (a, b) control,
(c, d) 3_DAPS-, (e, f) MTAB-, and (g, h) SDS-treated biomass. a, c, e and g
belonged to the large-field images and b, d, f and h belonged to local area images.

5

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)
(e)

(f)
(f)

(g)

(h)
(h)

Figure S4. TEM images of intermediate-lipid Scenedesmus biomass for (a, b)
control, (c, d) 3_DAPS-, (e, f) MTAB-, and (g, h) SDS-treated biomass. a, c, e
and g belonged to the large-field images and b, d, f and h belonged to local area
images.

6

Figure S5. Efficiency of cell lysis by surfactants as evaluated by flow cytometry
for high-lipid Scenedesmus biomass amended with SYTOX. Samples are (a)
control (red line); (b) 3_DAPS (green line); (c) MTAB (purple line), and (d) SDS
(light blue) surfactant.

7

8