R-phycoerythrin extraction and purification from freshGracilariasp. using thermo-responsive systems

Abstract

Besides the good performance, the downstream process based in thermo-responsive systems was shown to be efficient and of lower environmental impact.

Insights on the use of alternative solvents and technologies to recover bio‐based food pigments

“…Apart from the most conventional ABS, an alternative methodology, also based on ABSs, was carried out to fractionate phycobiliproteins from red macroalgae (Vicente et al., 2019) and violacein from Yarrowia lipolytica yeast, from the contaminant proteins present in the respective extracts (Schaeffer et al., 2019). In these works, the authors applied the concept of aqueous micellar two‐phase systems (AMTPS), in which an aqueous solution of a surfactant (or more) above a certain concentration favors the formation of two aqueous phases (a surfactant‐rich and a surfactant‐poor phase) as a response to an increase in temperature.…”

“…In these systems, ILs were applied as co‐surfactants, meaning that they are present in a very small concentration, although facilitating the two‐phase formation. The literature on the field has shown that the application of AMTPS with ILs as co‐surfactants, for some specific processes, may enhance the performance of extraction, the selectivity of the extracted pigment, and/or reducing the use of other solvents (Vicente et al., 2019; Vicente, Lario, Pessoa, & Ventura, 2016). The authors have used these systems to develop a two‐step method to fractionate phycobiliproteins from other nonfluorescent proteins, and in a second step, to separate R‐PE from R‐phycocyanin, the main phycobiliproteins composing the macroalgae treated (Vicente et al., 2019).…”

“…(a) Diagram representing the five main issues to manipulate aiming at the development of a sustainable (downstream) process; (b) diagram prepared for the comparison between both processes developed to recover R‐PE, namely, the red line represents the process developed using aqueous micellar two‐phase systems (Vicente et al., 2019) and the blue line represents the process using induced precipitation (Martins et al., 2020)…”

“…In this case, two downstream processes were developed and optimized considering the separation of phycobiliproteins from the nonfluorescent proteins and also the R‐PE from the other phycobiliproteins, to be able to answer the demands of application only for R‐PE, but also applications interested in the phycobiliproteins as the final product. This objective was first achieved by applying AMTPS (Vicente et al., 2019) (as previously discussed in this review), but after the careful analysis of using R‐PE in a more pure state also in luminescent solar concentrators (Frias et al., 2019), we came out with the conclusion that a simpler and more environmentally friendly process was much more useful than the one first developed (complex, with several units of operation and with a significant environmental impact; Vicente et al., 2019). After, and considering the low purity demands and chemical (Bharmoria et al., 2020) and optical stability required to R‐PE as an optically active center, a new process was envisioned by induced precipitation, for which the environmental and economic impacts, even at larger scales of operation, are much more advantageous (Martins et al., 2020).…”

Development of a Microfluidic Platform for R-Phycoerythrin Purification Using an Aqueous Micellar Two-Phase System

“…As recently reported, the use of AMTPSs may overcome some of the drawbacks associated with the processing of fresh algal cells, which is one of the recurrent bottlenecks associated with algae processing. 17 , 18 , 26 …”