In the search of new functional food ingredients from algae

Abstract

The well-known correlation between diet and health demonstrates the great possibilities of food to maintain or even improve our health. This fact has brought about a great interest for seeking new products that can contribute to improve our health and wellbeing. This type of foods able to promote our health has generically been defined as functional foods. Nowadays, one of the main areas of research in Food Science and Technology is the extraction and characterization of new natural ingredients with biological activity (e.g., antioxidant, antiviral, antihypertensive, etc) that can contribute to consumer's well-being as part of new functional foods. The present work shows the results of a bibliographic revision done on the chemical composition of different macroalgae together with a critical discussion about their potential as natural sources of new functional ingredients.

Variation of bioactive compounds in dried seaweedHimanthalia elongatasubjected to different culinary processes

“…Also, considering their great taxonomic diversity, investigations related to the search for new biologically active compounds from algae can be seen as an almost unlimited field. For this reason, algae can be a very interesting natural source of new compounds with biological activity that could be used as functional ingredients (Plaza, Cifuentes, & IBANEZ, 2008). Traditionally, seaweeds have been exploited mainly for the industrial production of phycocolloids, such as agar-agar, alginate, and carrageenan, used as gelling and thickening agents in the food or pharmaceutical industries and not as culinary items or for recovering beneficial biomolecules.…”

<b><i>In vitro</i> evaluation of antioxidant activity of methanolic extracts obtained from seaweeds endemic to the coast of Ceará, Brazil

“…they have developed diverse defense strategies and are capable of producing a wide variety of secondary metabolites (biologically active) (Plaza, Cifuentes, & Ibáñez, 2008, Lordan et al, 2011. ROS are relatively unstable molecules derived from molecular oxygen by electron addition, and RNS refers to nitric oxide (generated by nitric oxide synthetases) and its derivatives, e.g., hydroxyl radical (HO -), hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ), nitric oxide (NO -), dinitrogen trioxide (N 2 O 3 ) and peroxynitrite (ONOO -).…”

Acidogenic fermentation of Scenedesmus sp.-AMDD: Comparison of volatile fatty acids yields between mesophilic and thermophilic conditions

“…polyunsaturated lipids such as omega-3) and proteins. This enables several possible applications for food (Plaza et al, 2008), animal feed (Pulz and Gross, 2004), pharmaceutical (Borowitzka, 1995) and cosmetic industry (Stolz and Oberbayer, 2005). Microalgae are also a suitable feedstock for the production of energy carriers, such as biodiesel (Schenk et al, 2008)), bioethanol (Harun et al, 2010), biohydrogen (Hankamer et al, 2007) and methane (Frear et al, 2013;Golueke et al, 1957;Montingelli et al, 2015;Sialve et al, 2009).…”