Abstract
The sea cucumber or holothurian is a marine species which has been prized in some Asian countries for its nutritional qualities. The purpose of this work was to study the biochemical composition and free radical scavenging and antioxidant activities of Holothuria tubulosa tegument from the Bizerta lagoon in northern Tunisia. The obtained data demonstrated that the extract of sea cucumber teguments exhibited high biochemical levels (such as moisture 80.77%, protein 7.07%, lipids 10.21%, energy value 13.64 Kcal/g ww), and an important nutritional value (including n-3/n-6: 2.11, EPA+DHA: 20.96, AI: 1.38 and TI: 0.54). High antioxidant activities were recorded in the integument by the radical scavenging tests of ABTS and DPPH as well as by the total antioxidant capacity and the FRAP in comparison with the BHT standard. Our results showed that H. Tubulosa tegument has high nutritional value with high antioxidant activities and could be considered a nutraceutical product.
Highlights
The results revealed that lipid levels were the major compounds in the tegument (10.213 ± 0.372%) followed by proteins (7.077 ± 0.145%)
Our data were more important in terms of lipids than those reported by Çakli et al, (2008) carried out on H. fuscogilua, H. ananas, B. argus and H. tubulosa
Our results showed a high value for the n-3 PUFA/n-6 PUFA ratio, which was around 2.1 (Table 3) and is considered as a good index which is higher than the recommended value (0.25) reported by the UK Department of Health (1994)
Summary
The purpose of this work was to study the biochemical composition and free radical scavenging and antioxidant activities of Holothuria tubulosa tegument from the Bizerta lagoon in northern Tunisia
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