Microalgae selection for prospective antioxidant compound production by DPPH assay / Izwani Ibrahim

Microalgae are the candidate of producing natural antioxidant that can be used in biopharmaceutical application such as anticancer, antibacterial, and many more. Therefore, further study was conducted in Microalgae Research Laboratory (MRL), Faculty of Pharmacy UiTM Puncak Alam in order to detect the antioxidant properties in the rnicroalgae. In order to extract the antioxidants that exist within the rnicroalgae, the method of extraction suggested by Mannan et al. (2010) was used in this study. The rnicroalgae species used are still unknown but are marked according to their original location. Those rnicroalgae were Ku Lorn 2 X2 and Z5. The extraction method used is known as solvent extraction with hexane, ethyl acetate and 80°C deionised water as the solvents with 30 minutes of extraction time at room temperature. The antioxidant capacity was analysed by using DPPH assay. At the end of this study, there were negative percentage scavenging activity of DPPH. This leads to a few speculations on what factors that contribute to absence of antioxidant activity in the microalgae strains. The factors may arise during steps of production of MDEs. One of the steps is during microalgae culturing which involve the abiotic factor such as nitrogen concentration, incident light intensity, temperature variation and others. The stressors that are given to the rnicroalgae will cause it to produce more secondary metabolites and thus, higher amount of antioxidants. During rnicroalgae extraction, types of solvents, extraction time and temperature and also solvent-to-solid ratio is very crucial in extracting maximum amount of antioxidant from the microalgae cell. Therefore, extraction methods needs to be revised for determination of antioxidants in microalgae.