Algal nutraceuticals: a perspective on metabolic diversity, current food applications, and prospects in the field of metabolomics

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.The research leading to these results was supported by the European Union through the “NextGenerationEU” program supporting the “Margarita Salas” grant awarded to P. Garcia-Perez, by Xunta de Galicia for supporting the program EXCELENCIA-ED431F 2020/12, the postdoctoral grant of L. Cassani (ED481B-2021/152), and the pre-doctoral grant of P. Garcia-Oliveira (ED481A-2019/295) and by MICINN supporting the Ram´on y Cajal grant for M.A. Prieto (RYC-2017-22891) and J. Xiao (RYC-2020-030365-I). Authors are grateful to Bio Based Industries Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 888003 UP4HEALTH Project (H2020-BBI-JTI-2019). The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and the Bio Based Industries Consortium. This work has also received funding from the Argentinean Agency for the Scientific and Technological Promotion (ANPCyT, Argentina) under the project PICT (2020)/1602.