The improvement of phycocyanin stability extracted from Spirulina sp using extrusion encapsulation technique

Abstract

The stability of phycocyanin extracted from microalgae Spirulina has been evaluated and it showed that the stability of this antioxidant was affected by temperature and pH changes. The encapsulation technique was of the alternatives to overcome this stability changes. The objective of this paper was to investigate the effects of coating materials (alginate and chitosan) during encapsulation by using extrusion technique. The experiments were conducted with variation of alginate as coating materials. The size of each microcapsules was evaluated by using SEM/XRD for its size and homogeneity.