Algal Production for Human Health
Algae are important cell factories to produce nutraceuticals and nutrients, such as vitamins, pigments, sugars, and unsaturated fatty acids. In addition, algae are attractive hosts to produce biopharmaceuticals because of their unique advantages, including low production costs, lack of toxic compounds in many species, high biosynthetic capacity, and their potential use as oral delivery vehicles.
Nutritional Resources from Algae
Microalgae are one of the rich nutritional resources found in nature, producing a wide range of commercially valuable products.
They produce vitamins, which increases their importance as nutritious food for humans and animals. For example, as multi-ingredient dietary supplements, Aphanizomenon sp. and Spirulina ap. are freshwater blue-green algae that contain various nutrients such as protein, B vitamins, vitamin E, chlorophyll, beta-carotene, and iron.
Various species produce biologically active and commercially important pigments such as chlorophyll, beta-carotene, and other carotenoids, phycobiliproteins, and astaxanthin. These pigments are essential in the treatment of tumorigenesis, neuronal disorders, and optical diseases.
Algae produce a variety of saccharides, such as polysaccharides and oligosaccharides with specific molecular structures and biological activities that can be used for immunomodulation, antitumor, antiviral, antioxidant, and hypolipidemic purposes.
Microalgae also produce and accumulate large amounts of lipids that vary from species to species and are influenced by a variety of factors. Lipids in algal cells exist mainly as glycerol, esterified sugars to different types of fatty acids. The unsaturated fatty acids produced by algae have nutritional and medicinal value.
Algae-Made Biopharmaceuticals
Microalgae have proven to be very useful platforms for protein production for a variety of industrial and therapeutic applications, especially for complex or heavily disulfide-bonded proteins. As safe and environmentally friendly hosts, success stories have been reported to produce vaccines, antibodies, antimicrobial peptides, growth factors/cytokines, and hormones in algae.
Vaccines
The first reported synthetic vaccine antigen from algae is a chimeric molecule containing the structural protein VP1 of FMDV (foot-and-mouth disease virus) and the beta subunit of cholera toxin (CTB), a known mucosal adjuvant. This antigen has been previously expressed in plants and has demonstrated oral immunity in mice. It is more productive in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii compared to plants.
Antibodies
Monoclonal antibodies can be used as detection reagents in scientific research and have also been developed for the treatment of human diseases, including different types of cancer, autoimmune diseases, and infectious diseases. Antibodies can be expressed using either nuclear or chloroplast transformation of algae, but the chloroplast approach is more common in antibody production due to the relatively large size of chloroplasts, up to 70% of the cell volume.
Antimicrobial Peptides
As a protein production platform, algae can be used not only to produce sequence-specific antimicrobial peptides, but algae themselves can also produce natural antimicrobial peptides, such as those isolated from Tetraselmis suecica (Kylin), which are effective against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.
Growth Factors/Cytokines
As a single-cell, economically attractive, and sustainable green microbial cell factory, transgenic Chlamydomonas reinhardtii can be used to express human pro-angiogenic growth factors, namely hVEGF-165, hPDGF-B, and hSDF-1.
Hormones
Algae can act as cell factories for hormone production. For example, marine algae can produce structurally diverse bioactive oxidative lipids, such as the Oxylipins family of oxidative fatty acids, which are widely known as tissue hormones in mammals.
Our Services
As a pioneer in algae research, Lifeasible has been working on algae research and analysis for many years and has accumulated a wealth of experience to provide high-quality algae isolation and culture services, algae engineering services, algae analysis services, algae genetic screening services, algae-based production services, algae monitoring services, algae treatment services, and algae-based biosensor services for environmental monitoring. Please contact us for more information.
Our services are for research use only and not for any clinical use.