Abstract

Marine macroalgae are important ecological and commercial biomass resources to many regions of the world. They are valuable food resources and are most promising sources of bioactive compounds for the cosmetic industries. Phytochemical off-line investigation by the separation and identification of secondary metabolites are time, material and human resource consuming. Thus, in our studies, a rapid GC-MS (Gas Chromatography-mass spectrometry) on-line analysis with pretreatment (chemical derivatisations) was adapted for chemical profiling of two wild growing algae: Gracilaria dura and Hypnea mucisformis from Corsica (France). Two GC-MS derivatisation methods were used: transmethylation for the fatty acids (FAs), and trimethylsilylation for compounds which bear -OH/-NH function. The application of the method on Gracilaria dura, and Hypnea mucisformis leads to an identification of FAs, phytosterols, esters, simple phenolic compounds, and sugars from n-pentane, ethyl acetate (EtOAc) and n-butanol (n-BuOH) extracts. This method is quick and low-cost for chemical profiling of marine biomass. It could be applied not only by the fundamental but also cosmetic industrial research. In addition, this study showed that all algae extracts had modest DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) scavenging activities and the n-BuOH extract of Hypnea mucisformis had a high total phenol content.

Keywords: GC-MS, Chemical derivatisations, chemical profiling, Corsican, red algae