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Publication
Marine microalgae as sources of bioactive compounds with anti-inflammatory action
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Abstract(s)
Inflammation is a defensive mechanism stimulated when the body is attacked by pathogens or irritants, or when cells are damaged. Sometimes, these defensive mechanisms can go wrong, emerging to different inflammatory diseases, such as acute inflammation and chronic inflammation. Despite the existence of several anti-inflammatory drugs on the market, new drugs with fewer side effects and higher efficacy are required for the treatment of inflammatory diseases. Attention has been given to natural bioactive compounds derived from marine organisms, since these are well known to be a source of potential bioactive compounds with different therapeutic applications in several diseases including inflammatory diseases.
The aim of this research project was therefore to find compounds that can serve as new anti-inflammatory drugs or drug leads in microalgae. For that purpose, water, ethanol and ethyl acetate extracts of different microalgae species (Porphyridium sp., Nannochloropsis sp., Tetraselmis sp. CTP4, Isochrysis sp., Phaeodactylum tricornutum, Skeletonema costatum, Spirulina sp., Haematococcus pluvialis and Tetraselmis chuii) were characterized for its antioxidant activity as a pre-screening effort to select the most bioactive species/extracts. The most antioxidant extracts (ethanol extracts of Nannochloropsis sp., Tetraselmis sp. CTP4, and Tetraselmis chuii and water extracts of Nannochloropsis sp. and Porphyridium sp.) were afterwards screened for their anti-inflammatory activity measuring the inhibition of TNF-α production by LPS-stimulated human macrophage-differentiated THP-1 cells (Mac-THP-1). The best results were obtained with the ethanol extract of Tetraselmis sp. CTP4 (87% inhibition of TNF-α at 50 μg/mL in respect to the LPS control). This extract was therefore fractionated using liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), and the fractions were re-checked for their anti-inflammatory activity, using the previous method in a bioassay-guided fractionation effort. The most active fraction (the hexane fraction) was later analyzed by GC-MS to tentatively identify some of the compounds present in the fraction that could be responsible for its anti-inflammatory properties. Most of the compounds identified were fatty acids, some of which had already been reported to have anti-inflammatory properties. Further studies are needed to identify the exact compound or compounds responsible for the anti-inflammatory effect in the active fraction. Nonetheless, these results indicate that microalgae can be a source of compounds with the ability to minimize and reduce inflammation.
Description
Keywords
Microalgae Inflammation Antioxidant activity Bioactive compounds Solid-liquid extraction Liquid-liquid Fractionation GC-MS