Publisher's Synopsis
The oceans compass various source of biologically active compounds, of which macroalgae and microalgae are the most prolific producers to withhold high medicinal prospectives (Samrot and Thirunalasundari, 2012; Renitta et al., 2020). Mostly, microalgae are found in benthic, coasta and throughout the sea and macroalgae or seaweeds were spotted in the coastal region. Macroalgae are eukaryotic organisms present in salt- or freshwater and have been exploited for the rich resource of fundamental bioactive molecules. The macroalgae are nurtured through the osmosis process since they do not roots, leaves, and vascular systems. The algae are grouped based on pigmentation and shape as Chlorophyta (green algae), Phaeophyta (brown algae), and Rhodophyta (red algae) (Gupta and Abu-Ghannam, 2011) and further classification was based on the electron microscopy pictures and molecular biology analyses (Rindi et al., 2012). The presence of chlorophyll pigment renders green color to Chlorophyta while the presence of fucoxanthinpigment poteniates the brown color in Phaeophyta, and the presence of phycocyanin and phycoerythrin pigments offers red pigmentation in Rhodophyta (Rasmussen and Morrissey, 2007). More than 150,000 macroalgae or seaweed species are originated from the seabed and tropical waters. About 8000 marine seaweeds and are found up to 270 m deep have been reported in the coastline areas. Globally, around 2000 to 6000 of types of brown, green, and red macroalgae were identified with an annual production estimating to be 6.7 million tons of biomass (Leandro et al., 2020). The west-central, southwest, and northwest Atlantic and the southwest and central-east Pacific are the primary reservoirs of algae. India has extensive marine reserves along many estuaries and accessible coastlines (Hakim and Patel, 2020).
