Ricerc@Sapienza

Many food components have demonstrated biological activities useful in the prevention, management and treatment of deseases, and the use of food protein-derived bioactive peptides as functional ingredients in foods is a rapidly developing area of food innovation.
Microalgae are a group of unicellular photosynthetic microscopic organisms, widely found in aquatic and terrestrial habitats, and characterized by a particular versatility in adjusting to distinct growth conditions. Microalgae are currently cultivated on a large scale for biotechnological exploitation, and the potential for producing functional foods using microalgae derived peptides and other bioactive compounds is enormous.
The main goal of this research is the characterization and isolation of bioactive metabolites from microalgae of Chlorella and Scenedesmus species. First, the attention will be focused on bioactive peptides, due to their importance in the food industry, then on lipids. Due to the limited information on the detailed profiles and primary sequences of microalgae proteins, the primary aim of this study is the development of an analytical strategy for the recovery, separation and identification of bioactive peptides from microalgae. For this purpose, different extraction protocols and enzymes for protein hydrolysis will be tested. The peptide purification will be carried out by multidimensional liquid chromatography, preferably using environmental friendly solvents.
Lipid analysis will be performed by a shotgun lipidomic approach, coupling liquid chromatography to high resolution mass spectrometry to sequence eluting lipids. Data will be handled by freeware software for lipid identification. According to sample complexity, a fractionation step prior to the lipidomic analysis and lipid identification will be performed to identify the specific lipids responsible of the observed bioactivity, similarly to what previously described for peptides.