Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Sea cucumber is considered excellent tonic food due to its impressive nutritional profiles with multiple medicinal properties. The body wall of sea cucumber is the main marketable food product (~50%). However, during sea cucumber processing, internal organs and flower are ultimately discarded as processing waste. These by-products represent up to 50% of the harvested biomass. They are a rich source of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), amino acids, vitamins, minerals, polysaccharides, saponins, carotenoids, and phenolics. Nevertheless, the limited information on the utilization of sea cucumber discards is the major obstacle to utilizing them into value-added products. Currently, there are no established processing techniques to isolate and recover valuable bioactive compounds from these discards to address both the environmental concerns and economic sustainability of sea cucumber processing industries. Our research team has been striving to develop technologies to recover bioactive compounds, including phenolics, vitamins, lipids, and proteins/ peptides, from Atlantic sea cucumber for several years. However, very little is known about the PUFAs, saponins, carotenoids, and polysaccharides of sea cucumber processing discards and their biological properties. The content and functional properties of these compounds can vary based on geographic locations and harvesting periods. Most of our present work is carried out on the C. frondosa collected in September from the 3PS region of the Newfoundland coastline. To complement this work, in-depth research should be conducted on this species harvested from different Atlantic regions with various harvesting periods to validate the previous findings and maximize sustainability and economic viability. Since viscera contain up to 90% water, these valuable by-products need to be dried immediately after the evisceration to control the enzymatic degradation. Thus, efficient and economical drying methods must be established to preserve bioactive compounds. Techniques need to develop to improve the stability of these extracted bioactive compounds to avoid the interactions and degradation of these bioactive compounds. For instance, encapsulation is a process of coating which retains active compounds through the structuring of systems and preserves their physical, chemical, and biological properties. Besides, liquid extracts can be prepared from sea cucumber discards and launched in the nutraceutical market. Given the potential applications, an expanded research program is required to support the previous findings on the full utilization of this species. The research would focus on developing full utilization technologies to produce value-added products rich in PUFAs, saponins, carotenoids, and polysaccharides from discards and enhance the sustainability of sea cucumber fisheries. The long-term objective of this program is to develop a bioprocessing strategy for producing nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals.