Fatty acid and metabolomic profiling approaches differentiate heterotrophic and mixotrophic culture conditions in a microalgal food supplement 'Euglena'.

Min Zeng,Yongdong Zou,Mengliang Shi,Liqing Zhao,Wenlong Hao,Weiwen Zhang,Anping Lei,Yongguang Jiang,Peng Xiao,Jiangxin Wang,Zhangli Hu

doi:10.1186/s12896-016-0279-4

Min Zeng, Yongdong Zou + Show 9 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12896-016-0279-4

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Journal: BMC biotechnology	Publication Date: Jun 2, 2016
Citations: 58	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: Shenzhen University, Tianjin University

Abstract

BackgroundMicroalgae have been recognized as a good food source of natural biologically active ingredients. Among them, the green microalga Euglena is a very promising food and nutritional supplements, providing high value-added poly-unsaturated fatty acids, paramylon and proteins. Different culture conditions could affect the chemical composition and food quality of microalgal cells. However, little information is available for distinguishing the different cellular changes especially the active ingredients including poly-saturated fatty acids and other metabolites under different culture conditions, such as light and dark.ResultsIn this study, together with fatty acid profiling, we applied a gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS)-based metabolomics to differentiate hetrotrophic and mixotrophic culture conditions.ConclusionsThis study suggests metabolomics can shed light on understanding metabolomic changes under different culture conditions and provides a theoretical basis for industrial applications of microalgae, as food with better high-quality active ingredients.

Highlights

Microalgae have been recognized as a good food source of natural biologically active ingredients
Growths under different culture conditions The differential growth of E. gracilis under mixo- (HL) and heterotrophic (HD) culture conditions were shown in the Fig. 1
E. gracilis could accumulate a considerable amount of short-chain fatty acids (FAs) with the majority of C12-C16:0; In contrast, only under the light conditions, desaturase activity was enhanced to generate a set Paramylon quantification Paramylon, the high-valued product from E. gracilis, was one of our interests

Summary

Introduction

Microalgae have been recognized as a good food source of natural biologically active ingredients. The green microalga Euglena is a very promising food and nutritional supplements, providing high value-added poly-unsaturated fatty acids, paramylon and proteins. It was found that microalgae are a good source of natural active ingredients [1], and its chemical composition shows a great deal of diversity. Since environmental factors such as temperature, salinity, light, nutrition etc. Could affect the chemical composition of microalgal cells, changes in environmental parameters can stimulate or inhibit the biosynthesis of a natural sources of biologically active ingredient [2]. With the continuous development of innovative detection techniques and data processing methods, metabolomics research scope has been involved in many fields, such as botany [13, 14], food and nutrition sciences [15, 16], toxicology studies [17], clinical diagnosis [18] and more, demonstrating that metabolomics could be a powerful complementation to other “omics” approaches in fully deciphering the metabolic networks

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Results

Conclusion