*2.3. Molecular Identification*

In order to reveal the taxonomic identity of the BM1 isolate we obtained a partial sequence of its 18S rRNA gene (GenBank ID JQ867352.1). The homology search using the Basic Logical Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) showed the maximum (99%–100%) identity of the sequence with respective sequences of a number of known *H. pluvialis* strains (Figure 4). The phylogenetic analysis of the BM1 isolate showed that it belongs to *Haematococcus pluvialis* Flotow, the single species in the genus *Haematococcus* nested in the Chlorogonium clade, Volvocales, Chlorophyceae which is consistent with the generally accepted results of molecular identification of *H. pluvialis* [19]. Basing on the findings described above, the isolate BM1 was designated as *H. pluvialis* BM1. 

**Figure 4.** Phylogenetic relationships of BM1 isolate as revealed by 18S rRNA gene sequence. The optimal tree is shown. The percentage of replicate trees in which the associated taxa clustered together in the bootstrap test (1000 replicates) are shown under the branches for maximum likelihood/neighboring-joining (ML/NJ) method, respectively. All positions containing gaps and missing data were eliminated from the dataset. There were a total of 782 positions and 25 taxa in the final dataset. Phylogeny analysis was conducted in PhyML 3.0 and BioNJ. The tree was rendered using TreeDyn 198.3 software (GEMI Bioinformatics, Montpellier, France). 
