Affiliations: Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology,
Institute of Biotechnology, 18 Hoang Quoc Viet, Cau giay, Hanoi, Vietnam.
E-mail: [email protected]
Note: [] Corresponding author
Abstract: Vietnamese edible marine macro-algae (seaweed) are of interest
because of their value in nutrition and medicine. Vietnamese living in the
coastal have traditionally utilized seaweeds species as food supplement and
herbal medicine. They consumed seaweed as food in various forms: raw as salad
and vegetable, pickle with sauce or with vinegar, relish or sweetened jellies
and also cooked for vegetable soup. As herbal medicine, seaweed is usually used
for traditional comestics, treatments for cough, asthma, hemorrhoid, boils,
goitres, stomach ailments, urinary diseases, reduce the incidence of tumors,
ulcers and headaches. Although Vietnam has an abundance of algae floral with
total number of species is estimated to be nearly 1000 spp. in which there are
638 species of marine algae identified. However, there have been no intense
study regarding to changes in marine algal chemistry. The fifteen species of
edible seaweeds studied in this paper include green, brown and red algae. The
proximate compositions as ash, protein, lipid, carbohydrate, fatty acids,
vitamines, pigments, macro and micro-elements were compared among different
species examined and the genetic relationships among them by analyzing the
species-specific differences in nucleotide sequences of ITS-1 region of the
ribosomal DNA was identified.
Keywords: edible seaweed, protein, lipid, fatty acid, macro and micro-elements, ITS-1 region of the rDNA
Journal: BioFactors, vol. 22, no. 1-4, pp. 323-325, 2004
