MICROENCAPSULATION OF BIOACTIVE MOLECULES FROM SPIRULINA PLATENSIS AND HAEMATOCOCCUS PLUVIALIS

Nowadays, there is a trend towards a healthier way of living as well as a growing awareness by consumers what benefits for the health certain ingredients have in maintaining it. Preventing diseases through diet is a unique opportunity to use new functional foods. The development and achievement of functional foods requires technologies for incorporating of these investigated health promoting ingredients into food without reducing their bioavailability or functionality. A very interesting example of new functional foods is microalgae. Our laboratory is investigating the special properties of Spirulina platensis and Haematococcus pluvialis and its possibilities to be included in functional foods. Experiments and efforts have been made to develop nutraceuticals or functional food in order to prevent or manage different kind of diseases. Spirulina as well as Astaxanthin, with their beneficial health effects, has become one of the nutraceutical foods with a diverse beneficial effect on a big spectrum of disease conditions. Parts of the biologically active compounds in Spirulina and Astaxanthin are quite labile and easily degraded at different conditions such as high temperature, different pH, oxidation and others. This leads to the necessity to find/optimize the ways of how Spirulina and Astaxanthin are preserved in order to be consumed by the human organism. One of the possible solutions to this problem is using microencapsulation techniques. The aims of this work is to explore, validate, produce, analyze and improve the production of encapsulates for future use in the field of food technology and food industry. In this manuscript the technique of vibrational nozzle has been used with food grade polymers in order to set up a suitable microencapsulation method for the preservation of Spirulina platensis and Astaxanthin and to preserve them from external environment influences. The future perspective of this work is to set up a scale-up method for the production of Astaxanthin and Spirulina microencapsulates on an industrial level.