Title:
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Investigation of macroalgal polyphenols and peptides with potential antioxidant and antihypertensive activities
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Macroalgal phlorotannins and peptides are increasingly being investigated for
their health-promoting properties; however in-depth research into the occurrence,
bioactivity, profiling and molecular properties of these components in Irish species is
limited.
The process by which bioactives are extracted and purified from their original
biomass must be efficient and food-friendly to be applicable to the food industry. Two
different extraction methods, solid-liquid extraction (SLE) and pressurised liquid
extraction (PLE), were compared for the extraction of polyphenols from three brown
macroalgae, Ascophyllum nodosum, Pelvetia canaliculata and Fucus spiralis, and a
green macroalga, Ulva intestinalis. SLE was deemed to be a more industrially
relevant technique for generating food-friendly antioxidant extracts than PLE as it
requires less capital investment, is food-safe, and can be scaled up.
Molecular weight cut-off (MWCO) fractionation and reverse-phase flash
chromatography techniques were employed to enrich the polyphenol content of brown
macro algal SLE extracts by removing predominantly sugars from the extracts.
Furthermore, the use of bioassay-guided fractionation indicated that the observed
antioxidant activities of the extracts could be attributed to the polar, medium-to-high
molecular weight phlorotannins.
The analytical quality control and standardisation of naturally-sourced
functional extracts has become a requirement for their use in the food industry. In this
work, a rapid ultra-performance liquid chromatography® (UP LC®) method was
presented for the profiling of low molecular weight phlorotannin isomers for
polymers up to 16 monomers in length from the three brown species. The
predominant size ranges of the phlorotannins found in A. nodosum, P. canaliculata
and F. spiralis were 6-11, 6-13 and 4-6 monomers, respectively.
The identification of bioactive peptides has been largely unexplored. In this
work, various peptides were isolated from a trypsin-digested Ascophyllum nodosum
protein extract. A selection of peptides were synthesised and their in vitro antioxidant
and antihypertensive activities assayed. The polypeptide EKTGLLNVVETAEKFL
displayed the highest renin enzyme inhibition of 56.12 ± 2.66 % and this is the first
report of renin inhibitory peptides identified from brown macro algae
Computational chemistry may act as a support to natural products experiment,
through the provision of data on the molecular properties of individual components
and also on potential binding interactions between mixtures of bioactive components.
Density functional theory was employed to theoretically determine the radical
scavenging potential of various 7-phloroeckol conformers through the calculation of
their O-H bond dissociation enthalpies. Furthermore, a molecular dynamics
simulation approach was proposed for the investigation of binding interactions
between a selected macro algal phlorotannin and a bioactive peptide from A. nodosum.
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