Abstract
Marine ecosystems cover more than 70% of the globe’s surface. These habitats are occupied by a great diversity of marine organisms that produce highly structural diverse metabolites as a defense mechanism. In the last decades, these metabolites have been extracted and isolated in order to test them in different bioassays and assess their potential to fight human diseases. Since traditional extraction techniques are both solvent- and time-consuming, this review emphasizes alternative extraction techniques, such as supercritical fluid extraction, pressurized solvent extraction, microwave-assisted extraction, ultrasound-assisted extraction, pulsed electric field-assisted extraction, enzyme-assisted extraction, and extraction with switchable solvents and ionic liquids, applied in the search for marine compounds. Only studies published in the 21st century are considered.
Highlights
Since the 1960’s the interest in the marine environment has greatly increased and during the last fifty years more than 20,000 compounds were isolated from marine organisms
The solvent can be heated above its normal boiling point by applying a defined pressure, which accelerates the mass transfer of the compounds from the natural matrix to the bulk solvent [38,41]
For carotenoids and chlorophylls extraction, most of the results showed that the best extraction yields were obtained when ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) was carried out, but supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) was a more efficient method for the recovery of carotenoids, since higher Car/Chl ratios were obtained
Summary
Since the 1960’s the interest in the marine environment has greatly increased and during the last fifty years more than 20,000 compounds were isolated from marine organisms. The development of the high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer (NMR) in the 1970’s greatly contributed to this scenario [1] and since 1984 systematic annual reviews have been published, reporting novel marine compounds [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. As we will discuss at the end of this review, the common practices are still far away from what is desired for the 21st century and, probably, more work and more environmental policies are needed to convince the research community and the industry to move one step forward and replace the conventional extractions (Soxhlet and maceration) by those described
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
