Physiological and Physico-Chemical Characterization of Dietary Fibre from the Green Seaweed Ulva Fasciata Delile/Caracterizacao Fisiologica E Fisico-Quimica Da Fibra Alimentar Da Macroalga Marinha Verde Ulva Fasciata Delile (Report‪)‬

1. Introduction The nutritive value of seaweeds is mainly due to their protein, polysaccharide, mineral and vitamin contents. The high levels of non-digestible polysaccharide in their cell wall make seaweeds a rich source of dietary fibre (330-500 g.[kg.sup.-1], dry weight basis) (Ruperez and Saura-Calixto, 2001). There are, however, different types of dietary fibre (DF) in each seaweed group. Thus, brown seaweeds show alginates, fucans and laminarans as soluble DF, while the red ones have the galactans agar and carragenin. The green seaweeds, the object of study of this work, show the soluble ulvans and an insoluble fraction, which does not differ much in the different seaweed groups. It consists mainly of cellulose. One exception for that is the red seaweed nori, which contains insoluble mannans and xylans (Ruperez and Saura-Calixto, 2001).