Affiliations 

  • 1 Institute of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Electronic address: bakru24@gmail.com
  • 2 Institute of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Adv. Food Nutr. Res., 2014;73:197-220.
PMID: 25300548 DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-800268-1.00010-X

Abstract

Marine carbohydrates are most important organic molecules made by photosynthetic organisms. It is very essential for humankind: the role in being an energy source for the organism and they are considered as an important dissolve organic compound (DOC) in marine environment's sediments. Carbohydrates found in different marine environments in different concentrations. Polysaccharides of carbohydrates play an important role in various fields such as pharmaceutical, food production, cosmeceutical, and so on. Marine organisms are good resources of nutrients, and they are rich carbohydrate in sulfated polysaccharide. Seaweeds (marine microalgae) are used in different pharmaceutical industries, especially in pharmaceutical compound production. Seaweeds have a significant amount of sulfated polysaccharides, which are used in cosmeceutical industry, besides based on the biological applications. Since then, traditional people, cosmetics products, and pharmaceutical applications consider many types of seaweed as an important organism used in food process. Sulfated polysaccharides containing seaweed have potential uses in the blood coagulation system, antiviral activity, antioxidant activity, anticancer activity, immunomodulating activity, antilipidepic activity, etc. Some species of marine organisms are rich in polysaccharides such as sulfated galactans. Various polysaccharides such as agar and alginates, which are extracted from marine organisms, have several applications in food production and cosmeceutical industries. Due to their high health benefits, compound-derived extracts of marine polysaccharides have various applications and traditional people were using them since long time ago. In the future, much attention is supposed to be paid to unraveling the structural, compositional, and sequential properties of marine carbohydrate as well.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.