Question

How to extract betacarotene from dunaliella salina?

Answer 1

For the cell-wall-less Dunaliella species, I recommend to follow the protocol described in one of our papers (see below). For other species that do have cell walls, we routinely expand abovementioned protocol with a beat beating step to reach full extraction (see paper of Mulders et al. below).

For quantification, take care to check the purity of your standard (by comparing the extinction coefficient to text book data). Large impurities in commercial so-called 'pure standards' are very common for carotenoids.