-C-Phycocyanin is a natural blue dye used in food and pharmaceutical industry. In the present study, a simple and efficient method to extract C-phycocyanin from Spirulina platensis wet biomass is reported. The extractions were carried out using six different methods, including chemical (organic and inorganic acid treatment), physical (freezing and thawing, sonication, homogenization) and enzymatic (lysozyme treatment) methods. The extraction using ultrasonic bath in the presence of glass pearls in the biomass proved to be the most efficient method, 56% higher than using freezing and thawing (the method most frequently used), and presented a extraction yield of 43.75 mg.g -1 and a C-phycocyanin concentration of 0.21 mg.mL -1.

-C-phycocyanin is a natural blue dye extracted from Spirulina platensis, which has many applications in the food and pharmaceutical industries. In this paper the effect of pH and temperature on the adsorption of C-phycocyanin onto two different ion exchange resins (Streamline DEAE and Streamline Q XL) for expanded bed adsorption chromatography was investigated. Moreover, the kinetics and adsorption isotherm were evaluated. The equilibrium for the Q XL matrix was reached after 60 min, while for DEAE it was only reached after 140 min. C-phycocyanin showed the highest partition coefficient at pH 7.5 for both resins at 25 °C. The C-phycocyanin adsorption isotherm was very well represented by the Langmuir, Freundlich and Langmuir-Freundlich models, where the estimated values for Q m and K d obtained by the Langmuir isotherm were, respectively, 33.92 mg.mL -1 and 0.123 mg.mL -1 for DEAE, and 28.12 mg.mL -1 and 0.082 mg.mL -1 for the Q XL matrix. A negative cooperativity was observed for C-phycocyanin binding when the Q XL matrix was used, while the cooperativity was purely independent using the DEAE matrix.