Experiments were conducted comparing the individual removals of cadmium, copper, nickel, zinc and chromium from water via biosorption using Scendesmus obliquus, a common green alga. The goal was to characterize the biological treatment of water contaminated with heavy metals using life aquatic species and the effect of different concentrations of these metals on chlorophyll a content. In addition, experiments were performed to measure cell viability as a function of metal concentration and also to compare removal using living cells to nonliving ones. The data indicate that both living and nonliving cells of Scendesmus obliquus removed nearly all heavy metals from water, living alga cells significantly outperformed nonliving one in case of Cd metal removal.  The alga exhibited high uptake capacities for five metal ions. Maximum Cr (VI) removal reached around 97%, Cu (II) removal was at its maximum value which reached 98.5 % of its original initial concentration, as for Cd (II), Ni (II) and Zn (II), similar removal ratios were obtained ranging between 88% and 99.4%.