Separation and Identification of a Number of Unsaturated Fatty Acids From Different Types of Algae

Abstract

Recently, the interest in sustainable development is one of the most important fields of science and research because it aims to improve the life environment for all living organisms in general and for humans in particular. One of the areas of sustainable development is maintaining the integrity of the environment, reducing pollution, preserving energy sources and using clean energy from sustainable environmentally friendly sources. Algae represent the most important sustainable sources that succeed in achieving these goals, in addition to being a sustainable and renewable source for efficiently producing biofuels, they produce living mass that is used in the production of compounds that are used in various medical, industrial and agricultural industries. Besides, during their growth, they reduce pollution by producing oxygen and reducing carbon dioxide used in Photosynthesis to build different compounds and their high ability to absorb pollutants from various heavy metals, especially as well as nitrogen and phosphorous in the case of their increase in the developing environment in it, and the requirements for their growth are inexpensive and economical. The results showed, after separating of the algal oils by the Soxhlet extraction method with using hexane as a solvent for extraction, the superiority of the genus Westiellopsis in terms of the amount of lipids produced from biomass, amounting to 20%, followed by Gloeocapsa 18.5 %, while the unbranched filamentous alga Oscillatoria recorded 6.1% lipids. Therefore, the importance of composition of these oils from fatty acids represent important feature that is due to it in addition to the percentage of oil content in algae, the quality and quantity of these fatty acids differed between the species under study. The fatty acids that are preferred to be present in a higher percentage than the rest of the species are saturated and monounsaturated acids, as the first amounted to 2.14% and the second to 0.128% in Westiellopsis, so the percentage of desired fatty acids became 2.268% of the total diagnosed fatty acids 3.141%, , while Gloeocapsa oil showed the best percentage of preferred fatty acids for biodiesel (86.673%) which were composed from 0.969 % desired biodiesel fatty acids( saturate and monounsaturated fatty acids) , with a quantity of oils close to the. 0.515 % and best type in this study as indicated above. highest USFA in Westiellopsis that results in highest DU with corresponding to lowest % USFA/SAFA as well as lowest CN, while the equilibrium of DU for Gloeocapsa and Oscillatoria showed owning an equilibrium CN too.