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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The current consumers’ demand for food naturalness is urging the search for new functional foods of natural
origin with enhanced health-promoting properties. In this sense, algae constitute an underexplored biological
source of nutraceuticals that can be used to fortify food products. Both marine macroalgae (or seaweeds) and
microalgae exhibit a myriad of chemical constituents with associated features as a result of their primary and
secondary metabolism. Thus, primary metabolites, especially polysaccharides and phycobiliproteins, present
interesting properties to improve the rheological and nutritional properties of food matrices, whereas secondary
metabolites, such as polyphenols and xanthophylls, may provide interesting bioactivities, including antioxidant
or cytotoxic effects. Due to the interest in algae as a source of nutraceuticals by the food and related industries,
novel strategies should be undertaken to add value to their derived functional components. As a result,
metabolomics is considered a high throughput technology to get insight into the full metabolic profile of biological
samples, and it opens a wide perspective in the study of algae metabolism, whose knowledge is still little
explored. This review focuses on algae metabolism and its applications in the food industry, paying attention to
the promising metabolomic approaches to be developed aiming at the functional characterization of these
organisms.
Description
Keywords
Seaweeds Microalgae Bioactive compounds Health-promoting ingredients Foodomics
Citation
Garcia-Perez, Pascual; Cassani, Lucia; Garcia-Oliveira, Paula; Xiao, Jianbo; Simal-Gandara, Jesus; Prieto Lage, Miguel A.; Lucini, Luigi (2023). Algal nutraceuticals: a perspective on metabolic diversity, current food applications, and prospects in the field of metabolomics. Food Chemistry. ISSN 0308-8146. 409, 1-18
Publisher
Elsevier