INVESTIGADORES
CASSANI LucÍa Victoria
artículos
Título:
Algal nutraceuticals: A perspective on metabolic diversity, current food applications, and prospects in the field of metabolomics
Autor/es:
GARCIA-PEREZ, PASCUAL; CASSANI, LUCIA; GARCIA-OLIVEIRA, PAULA; XIAO, JIANBO; SIMAL-GANDARA, JESUS; PRIETO, MIGUEL A.; LUCINI, LUIGI
Revista:
FOOD CHEMISTRY
Editorial:
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
Referencias:
Año: 2023 vol. 409
ISSN:
0308-8146
Resumen:
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.