Bioactive peptides and carbohydrates from seaweed for food applications: Natural occurrence, isolation, purification, and identification

Macroalgae or seaweed are relative un-explored and promising sources of novel molecules for the food industry including peptides and carbohydrates for their use as functional foods and nutraceuticals. Several algae-derived bioactive compounds have shown a wide range of biological activities both in vitro and in vivo, i.e. antihypertensive and antioxidant, that are strongly associated with the chemical structure of the peptides or carbohydrates. Multiple improvements in the purification and analytical tools to characterize these compounds have been reported in recent years, aiming to gain further insight into the complexity of different molecular structures of bioactive peptides and carbohydrates. This paper discusses the variable composition of algae and the opportunities of the use of this biomass to obtain novel functional bioactive peptides and carbohydrates for functional food applications. The main biological activities of the discovered bioactive peptides and carbohydrates together with the analytical procedures used to purify and characterize multiple compounds are also discussed.