Recently, the development of alternative energy is becoming increasingly urgent as the world reserves of fossil fuels running out and globally averaged atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing. Microalgae synthesize and store large volumes of valuable lipid compounds and microalgal lipids have potential commercial application as a novel source of renewable biofuels in recent years. Total lipid extraction performed by commonly used extraction techniques such as Folch et al. (1957), Bligh and Dyer (1959) and Selstam and Oquist (1985), depend on a mixture of chloroform and methanol are complicated and timeconsuming for testing a large numbers of biological samples. In the present study, a simple and rapid method is presented for extraction of total lipids from unicellular green microalga Dunaliella salina. In this method, 8 mL of a 2:1 chloroform-methanol (v/v) mixture was added to 200 mg fresh microalgal material at room temperature. The suspension was agitated by manual shaking for 30s using a vortex mixer and after 5 min, 2 mL of a 0.73% NaCl water solution was added to produce a 2:1:0.8 system of chloroform: methanol: water (v/v/v). After phase separation, the bottom layer of the extracts was oven dried and the weight of this residue was recorded for a gravimetric estimate of total lipid content.
