Recently, microalgae was considered as a renewable energy for fuel production because its production is nonseasonal and may take place on nonarable land. Despite all of these advantages, microalgal oil production is significantly affected by environmental factors. Furthermore, the large variability remains an important problem in measurement of algae productivity and compositional analysis, especially, the total lipid content. Thus, there is considerable interest in accurate determination of total lipid content during the biotechnological process. For these reason, various high-throughput technologies were suggested for accurate measurement of total lipids contained in the microorganisms, especially oleaginous microalgae. In addition, more advanced technologies were employed to quantify the total lipids of the microalgae without a pretreatment. However, these methods are difficult to measure total lipid content in wet form microalgae obtained from large-scale production. In present study, the thermal analysis performed with two-step linear temeperature program was applied to measure heat evolved in temperature range from 310 to 351 degrees C of Nostoc sp. KNUA003 obtained from large-scale cultivation. And then, we examined the relationship between the heat evolved in 310-351 degrees C (H-E) and total lipid content of the wet Nostoc cell cultivated in raceway. As a result, the linear relationship was determined between H-E value and total lipid content of Nostoc sp. KNUA003. Particularly, there was a linear relationship of 98% between the H-E value and the total lipid content of the tested microorganism. Based on this relationship, the total lipid content converted from the heat evolved of wet Nostoc sp. KNUA003 could be used for monitoring its lipid induction in large-scale cultivation. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.