Introduction: The increasing interest on study of microorganisms such as fungi and bacteria, including cyanobacteria, is mainly associated to their commercial application in different areas such as nutrition and human health1. Spirulina platensis is a microalgae (cyanobacteria), which produces important photosynthetic pigments, among them phycocyanin is the most produced. This pigment has important chemical characteristics, such as: high water solubility, bluish coloration and fluorescence; characteristics that make the phycocianin a good candidate for clinical diagnoses applications2. Objective: Optimize the phycocyanin extraction from S. plantesis. Methods: The phycocyanin extraction was performed using dried S. plantesis (60°C for 24 h). The material was kindly provided by the Laboratório de Planctologia, Departamento de Engenharia de Pesca, Universidade Federal do Ceará. The extraction of phycocyanin was carried out using dynamic maceration (dMAC) at 25°C and microalgae/solvent ratio, 1:10. Some factors were studied in order to increase extraction efficiency. The factors were: pretreatment time (30, 60, 90 s), pretreatment technique (turbo-extraction, ultrasound and microwave), solvent (distilled water, phosphate buffer Saline, sea water, 20% ethanol, 40% ethanol) and extraction time of maceration (0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; 6; 15; 24 h). After the extraction, each sample was subjected to spectrophotometric analysis (615nm and 652nm) for the quantification of phycocianin3,4. Results: Turbo-extraction and ultrasound at 90 s were the better than microwave, although it did not influence the final results of the extraction by dMAC pretreated by these techniques. Distilled water was the best solvent extractor, which was agreement with Silveira et al (2007). The phycocyanin extraction, carried out by dMAC for 24 h in distilled water, without pretreatment, achieved a recovery yield of 21.80 ± 0.60 mg/g based on the dry weight of S. platensis. This result was different from some authors4,5 on the same conditions of extraction, except for the microalgae/solvent rate (1:25). The difference on recovery yields of this and others works may be due to the different parameters used on microalgae cultivation and the different temperatures used for microalgae drying processes. Conclusions: These results corroborate with the results obtained by other authors with respect to highest extraction yields obtained by the classical method of extraction (maceration), using distilled water as extractor solvent. The great advantage of this method is its enormous simplicity and low operating cost.