The Science Behind Purple Irish Sea Moss Application and Nutrition

One of our most popular seaweeds to date, Purple Irish Sea Moss (Chondrus crispus) has had a long history of human consumption. Components of the macroalgae have application in various commercial products including, but not limited to, food ingredients. If you have ever read the ingredient list on some of your favorite food items (see: ice cream!), you may notice in the small print the word “carrageenan” listed. Carrageenan is an extract of Purple Irish Sea Moss, generally used as a thickening agent in the food industry. Carrageenan has other uses besides being a food additive; as demonstrated in the images below, it can also be used in paper marbling.

Carrageenan Powder to be used for paper marbling, sold by the London Centre for Book Arts.

These marbled paper journals can be bought from Blue Sky Papers.

Agar-agar is another product extracted from seaweeds with similar applications in food and industry. Popular in desserts in Asia, and used as a solid substrate for cell culture and microbiology work, agar-agar can be derived from another red seaweed often confused with Purple Irish Sea Moss called Gracilaria. For information on telling these two species apart, check out our handy Irish Moss Cheat Sheet.

For carrageenan, industrial extraction methods involve digesting a mixture of the seaweed and an alkaline earth metal hydroxide in water heated to 98C (208F), just slightly cooler than water’s boiling point. Some examples of alkaline earth metal hydroxides include Lithium Hydroxide (LiOH), Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH), and Potassium Hydroxide (KOH). The presence of the hydroxide ion (OH-) is what makes the compounds basic, or alkaline.  Occasionally, industrially processed seaweed will be pretreated with a dilute acid, which is shown to improve yield of carrageenan extraction. In that way, the industrial method is similar to how some of our own customers have told us they prepare their Purple Irish Sea Moss.  According to Gina Marie on her blog, Vegan with Curves, it’s important to rehydrate dried Irish Moss in water with cut limes, a dilute acid. The rehydrated seaweed should then be blended with water that has been boiled and slightly cooled.

Four out of six steps from Gina Marie’s instructional guide to making Irish Moss Gel.

Irish Moss gel blend from one of our customers, founder of the growing brand Light Body Herbals, whose Purple Irish Sea Moss gel is so thick, it can be hung upside down without moving from its container!

In industry, the addition of the base, AKA the alkaline earth metal hydroxide, is what separates the carrageenan from the Chondrus crispus plant matter. Our customers enjoy Purple Irish Sea Moss as a whole plant, blended up and added to all sorts of recipes. Inspired by some of our customers’ accounts, we have even done some experimenting with Chondrus crispus in recipes here at Gulf of Maine, Inc. headquarters! Many of the people we sell to claim that daily consumption of Purple Irish Sea Moss has terrific benefits for their health, immunity, and overall well-being.

The industrial separation of carrageenan from the whole Irish Moss plant may result in a significant loss of nutrient density. It is the many fat-soluble pigments (lutein, beta-carotene), antioxidants (small volatile compounds that terminate chain reactions caused by free radicals), and chromo-proteins (refer to our last blog post about phycobilisomes!) present in the Chondrus crispus cell structure which are thought to be the components that contribute to its nutritional value. The isolation of carrageenan from Purple Irish Sea Moss means that the majority of these high nutrient compounds would be lost as by-products.

Additionally, cooking the whole Purple Irish Sea Moss plant may provide added nutritional value, increasing bioavailability of nutrients found in the sea plant. Dr. Julia Lopez-Hernandez and her team of researchers at the University of Santiago de la Compostela in Galicia, Spain found that when Purple Irish Sea Moss is heated in culinary processes (steamed or boiled), the concentration of antioxidants and fat-soluble pigments increases, while the concentration of certain chromo-proteins decreases.

This vegan pumpkin bread was made with Purple Irish Sea Moss gel in place of eggs.

That same study showed that dried and rehydrated samples of Chondrus crispus do not demonstrate significant changes in nutrient concentration, which implies that our dried variety of Purple Irish Sea Moss is all ready to be shipped and used in whatever recipe your heart desires! According to our Lexington, Kentucky based customers at The Seafood Lady, a tablespoon of Purple Irish Sea Moss gel can be used to substitute for an egg in baking recipes.

We tested it out here in a seasonal pumpkin spelt bread to great gains – and great grains!

So, try out your own recipes with Chondrus crispus sometime and let us know what you think!

Thanks for reading the blog and we hope you learned something interesting about this very special and prolific sea plant that we are so happy to offer for purchase at Gulf of Maine, Inc. :-)

Iridescent Purple Irish Sea Moss growing in a Gulf of Maine tide pool.

Health Guru Victor Bowman Seeks Wildcrafted Seaweeds at their Source

As we dive deeper into autumn and the colder months ahead, here at Gulf of Maine, Inc., we look back to some of our best summer memories. What a surprise it was when we got a call from Victor Bowman, the son of Honduran herbalist Dr. Sebi, saying he was in Portland, Maine and wanted to drive up to see us! 

We love hosting people and sharing all that we have and know in Cobscook Bay, so of course we gladly welcomed Mr. Bowman and his friends. Victor’s father, Alfredo “Dr. Sebi” Bowman, and his promotion and creation of the Alkaline Cell Food diet, has been the reason for many of our Purple Irish Sea Moss (Chondrus crispus) sales these days.

Edible seaweeds have been consumed throughout all of human history, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and are widely known for their high nutrient content and umami taste. Our seaweeds, which are macroalgae, absorb nutrients directly from the clean, cold waters of the Maine coastal shores. This is unlike land plants, which intake nutrients through their roots, filtering and fixing beneficial chemicals from the soils in which they grow.

Plants on land sport their characteristic green color thanks to the chlorophyll in their cells, which absorbs wavelengths of light in the blue and red-orange spectrum, but not the green spectrum. Since green is not absorbed, it is reflected. 

Purple Irish Sea Moss, by comparison, is of the phylum Rhodophyta, which means it is a red alga. The coloration of Chondrus crispus therefore results from its ability to absorb green light and reflect other wavelengths, which again distinguishes this macroalga from land plants.

Chondrus crispus, or Purple Irish Sea Moss, a red macroalga.

Diagram of Phycobilisomes taken from AAT Bioquest, aatbio.com

This adaptive advantage is the reason Purple Irish Sea Moss can grow with minimal light, deep into the low and mid tidal ranges, underneath the kelp beds. On a cellular level, the abundance of an accessory organelle called phycobilisomes attach like an antenna to the chlorophyll. The phycobilisomes are what help Chondrus crispus absorb and efficiently transform whatever wavelengths of light are available in the environment into glucose. This light harvesting process, facilitated by phycobilisomes, is called complementary chromatic adaptation. 

If you have ever been scuba diving, you may know that as you dive deeper into the sea, certain colors are lost to the light dispersion and absorption of water molecules. Red is the first color to go. Red not being absorbed by Chondrus crispus, means it will be reflected!

Due to tight schedules, Mr. Victor Bowman was not able to hang around for the low tides, which would have allowed us to harvest Purple Irish Sea Moss together. We did manage to examine a Bladder Wrack bed! Mr. Bowman was very pleased to discuss the benefits of Bladder Wrack and see it growing so abundantly on the rocks of our coastal Maine beaches. Bladder Wrack is a brown seaweed found closer to the splash zone, in the upper intertidal. 

Seaweed distribution by tidal range graphic taken from GallowayWildFoods.com

 We hope Victor Bowman comes back for our big spring tides to harvest Purple Irish Sea Moss when the season starts up again. Until then, Mr. Bowman, we wish you luck with your growing business, Bolingo Balance, and we hope you stay styling in your bright orange hat!

 Victor, like his father, is truly ahead of the times. Hunting season just started this past Saturday, so now we’re all wearing bright orange in Downeast Maine :-)

Happy hunting and harvesting!

University of Maine Farmington Lecturer Visits the Gulf of Maine on the Wild Hunt for Worms

Last week, Tidepool Tim welcomed Nancy Prentiss to Pembroke in search of the coveted subject of her latest invertebrate study. Nancy was after the polychaete worm, Myxicola infundibulum, more commonly referred to as the Slime Fan Worm. 

Polychaetes are segmented worms, with each segment of their body featuring pairs of protrusions, or parapodia. The parapodia are loaded up with fine bristles; these marine annelids are also known as “bristle worms.” The scientific term for the bristles is called chaetae. Thus, we come to the name of the class: poly (meaning many) + chaeta. Many bristles! 

Diagram taken from reefkeeping.com (Polychaete Annelid Identification)

Slime Fan Worms. Photo by Andrew J. Martinez

The chaetae aid in locomotion, stabilization, defense, and sensing the surrounding environment, and are made of chitin. Chitin, a long-chain polysaccharide, was also mentioned in our last blog post as being the flexible, though sturdy, chemical compound that forms the shell of the lobster. Chitin has an array of functions for other members of the animal kingdom including: arthropod exoskeletons, mollusk radulae, and fish scales. Plus, chitin is the same biomaterial that makes up the cell wall of fungi.

Nancy found us while looking online for a source of live Myxicola to use in her research studies. She has been borrowing older specimens from collaborating laboratories, but was really hoping to get some variety in the mix for her latest project, as she attempts to decipher differences in the DNA of Myxicola specimen from different geographic areas. What a pleasant surprise for Nancy to find that we have sources of Myxicola here and are in driving range of her home in Farmington!

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, students and researchers all over the world are feeling the strain of remote work on biological study as dissection labs shift to online demos, bench scientists are made to work in shifts, and field biologists have to limit their travel to key research areas. Nancy is making do with what resources she has at her disposal. Luckily, that includes the biodiverse tidal shores of coastal Maine.

 So, Nancy drove up to Cobscook Bay and got right to her digging! Slime Fan Worms have a distinctive appearance, “like a tiny palm tree sticking up out of cracks and holes,” according to Tidepool Tim. Their tentacles emerge around their mouth and make a funnel-like appearance, peeking up in between rocks and mussel shells on the seafloor.

Cobscook Bay Kelps in the morning sun. Photo by Nancy Prentiss.

Harvesting these worms was an arduous task, but Nancy enjoyed the morning sunlight and took some beautiful photos of our local kelps out in Cobscook Bay. She observed how differently the kelps grow by region, even just a few hours’ drive south on the Maine coastline.

Nancy’s challenge in harvesting these worms was that once she found a Slime Fan Worm, and attempted to dig it out of its burrow, the animal quickly recoiled into the mud. Using tools disturbs the silt, so Nancy had to wait until the particles settled before digging in again to find her little worm.

Myxicola infundibulum is covered in a mucus sheath that is two or three times the size of the worm itself. The worm uses its slime tube for protection from predators like crabs or fish, retreating into the slime tube like a turtle into its shell. As the worm retreats for protection, it leaves behind a trail of mucus. 

For Nancy, this mucus trail served like a smoke signal that led her right back to her point of attack.

 “Doesn’t look like much!” she said, pulling out from the water a Gulf of Maine Fine Specimen for her research purposes. We didn’t collect as many as we would have liked to this round, but sometimes that’s how things go – when the tide starts rushing in, the tidepoolers have to rush out back to dry land!

 We thank Nancy for visiting us here in Downeast Maine and hope she will come again to harvest with us soon!

Summer Internship Spotlight: The Recreational Lobsterwoman

Gulf of Maine, Inc. was happy to host Renée Rossi for the summer internship program. Reneé is a rising tennis star working on her double major in Spanish and Environmental Science at Thomas College. During her stay, she helped out with some video production for Tidepool Tim’s YouTube channel.

Besides riding the four-wheeler down to the beach, Renée probably had the most fun getting her non-commercial lobster harvesting license. Any Maine resident can apply for a non-commercial lobster license, and once you have one, you’re permitted to set up to five (5) traps in Maine’s coastal waters. While non-commercial license holders aren’t allowed to sell the lobsters, they are more than encouraged to enjoy their catch with friends and family. And thanks to Renée, we here at Gulf of Maine, Inc. this summer were in steady supply of lobster salad!

It’s worth mentioning that the lobsters in Cobscook Bay liked Renée’s traps the best because her buoys were hand painted with love. 

Last week, Renée came back to Pembroke to haul her traps for the end to her season. Really, there is no 'off-season' for lobsters, as they can be harvested year-round. But between college coursework and her job with The Boys and Girls Club of Maine, there’s just not enough time for Renée to come up and harvest as much as she’d like! Leaving her traps for too long without tending to them can lead to lost gear, as the buoys collect kelp and other seaweeds that create drag on the line and trap. Storm winds can then drag the bouy, line, and trap far from where they were set, causing "ghost-traps" which are never to be found again…

It’s true that on the coast of Maine, as well as for the rest of New England, we usually think of lobster as a summer food. There is absolutely more demand in the summer months with all of the visiting tourists. Plus, in the summer season, lobsters migrate to warmer waters of the shore to shed their shells – an exoskeleton made of a flexible biomaterial called chitin.

Freshly molted lobsters are considered soft-shelled; they have less meat per pound because their new shells are more spacious to allow for growth. But in order to grow, the lobsters need to feed. This makes soft-shell lobsters easy catch. They walk right into the kitchen looking for a meal!

Hand drawn lobster trap diagram courtesy of Eddie Atwell: (https://intothetrap.wordpress.com/)

So, if you visit Maine in the summer looking for a lobster dinner, you may be surprised to find two different prices per pound: cheaper prices for the soft-shell, and higher prices for less available hard-shell lobsters. In autumn, from about mid-September into December, the commercial lobstermen and women fetch a pretty penny for their catch! It’s this season when they harvest mostly hard-shell lobsters, which are sold and shipped around the world, often for Christmas dinners and New Year’s parties.

Heading into the winter months (January – March), due to the colder waters, lobsters are less active and so there’s significantly less lobstering. Still, some lobster harvesters brave the harsh cold, and boat out further offshore into rough waters to make a living. Most just wait until springtime for things to pick up again. In May and June, lobsters just about to molt have the most meat, and tourists come back to the New England coast to sightsee Maine’s natural wonders, and of course to eat the famous Maine lobster roll!

 We appreciate all the hard work from our student interns with Gulf of Maine, Inc., and we like to think our interns appreciate the perks that come along with life out in Cobscook Bay. We hope that Renée learned a lot out in the tide pools, and we know that for sure she loved her lobsters!

Why Arctic Fish Don’t Freeze: Extreme Marine Life

Antifreeze proteins

Polar sea water usually hovers around its freezing point: −1.8 °C, (28.8 °F). Under sheets of ice, in the deep, dark water of the polar regions, you might expect to find a desolate ecosystem. Perhaps only extremophile microbes. This is not the case. Under the ice, fishes are thriving!

How is this possible? They’re cold-blooded (ectotherms), after all. Their bodies don’t produce their own heat, and fishes are theoretically temperature consistent with the seawater. A tropical fish would immediately freeze if dropped into Arctic waters since the temperature of the saline liquid is below the freezing point of the fresh water in the cells of the fish.

The mechanism that has allowed fishes to survive in the presence of structurally diverse antifreeze proteins in their tissues. These proteins possess the powerful ability to separate the melting and growth temperatures of ice. These proteins have evolved independently in different kinds of cold-adapted ectothermic animals, including insects and teleost fishes, where they protect against lethal freezing of the body fluids. The AF proteins stick to developing ice crystals and prevent them from growing enough to damage tissue.

Trypsin-Like Serine Proteases

Antifreeze proteins function very similarly to trypsin-like serine proteases, which “attack” or stick to biomolecules through various mechanisms. TLSP enzymes are responsible for protein hydrolysis in our digestive system, clotted blood, infection resistance, and egg fertilization.

The AFGP found in Antarctic fishes, in fact, evolved from a serine protease of the pancreas.² But not all AFGPs are the same. They have evolved independently many times and allowed those species that possess them to adaptively radiate throughout a freezing niche with little competition.

Antifreeze proteins come in many “flavors”...fungi, bacteria, insects, polar fishes and even plants utilize antifreeze proteins to prevent their tissues from crystallizing in freezing temperatures. This is a case of convergent evolution, meaning TLSPs are relatively evolutionarily malleable. Humans haven't evolved them because our genome has not experienced pressure to develop AFGPs - we are warm-blooded endotherms, and we generate our own heat.

AFGPs are part of a larger class of ice-binding proteins (IBPs) which are utilized by subzero tolerant organisms. These proteins include:

1. Antifreeze proteins (AFGPs) with high thermal hysteresis antifreeze activity

2. Low thermal hysteresis IBPs

3. Ice nucleating proteins (INPs)

Multiple structurally distinct IBPs have arisen even within related taxa. True antifreeze proteins (1) are found in freeze-avoiding organisms which will die if frozen. In contrast, less active proteins (2) are found in freeze tolerant species, which are able to survive being frozen.

Molecular Evolution

About 30 million years ago, the waters of the Antarctic region became very cold. The fossil record shows Antarctica's once great diversity of fish was reduced to a single suborder Notothenioid. Their secret to success? The divergence of the antifreeze protein. These fish survived and had the opportunity to radiate into their choice of diet and habitats. They grew enormously in population size, creating subpopulations.² More than 90 species of these fish exist today. This is a classic example of adaptive radiation in evolution, similar to Darwin’s 13 finch species on the Galapagos.

On the other side of the globe, Arctic fishes evolved antifreeze proteins too, but through a different mechanism. The stunning diversity and spatial distribution of AFGPs leads scientists to believe that the different types evolved recently in response to sea level glaciation 2 million years ago in the northern hemisphere, and 30 million years ago in Antarctica. This sort of independent development of similar adaptations is referred to as convergent evolution.

The reason that multiple types of protein do the same job and have the same name is that they are very similarly shaped when they are folded, and they act on different surfaces of the ice molecules. Ice is always composed of oxygen and hydrogen, but it has many different surfaces for binding.

Applications in technology

Scientists have identified many nuances of antifreeze proteins, and they have been very useful in developing a number of human technologies, like to create perfectly consistent ice cream! In order to bring these advances into medicine, an interesting question was required to be answered: why do antifreeze proteins lock onto the ice but not liquid water? 

“If AFPs bound as easily to liquid water as they do to ice, this lifesaving action could turn killer, as animals would quickly dehydrate,” says Matthew Blakeley at the Laue-Langevin Institute in Grenoble, France.¹

How do we ensure healthy tissue is not damaged by molecules similar to antifreeze proteins when they are sent into the human body to attack a tumor? The answer lies in the tertiary structure of proteins: their shape. The shape of a protein is determined by a few factors. Proteins are amino acid chains. Between 20 common amino acids, at least two are linked to create a polypeptide chain, or protein. Each amino acid building block has a particular chemical profile based on its elemental components and their configuration. The profile of two amino acids determines what reaction will take place when they are in proximity. Every protein folds to a particular, signature shape due to the interaction between its amino acid components.

Antifreeze proteins act as a structural lock and key, based on their shape and the shape of ice crystals. They are compatible with the spiky formation of ice crystals, not the loose structure of water. By nature, they will not bind to water, and not dehydrate the organism they belong to.

Connection to the Gulf of Maine

The Gulf of Maine is our home, and we have AFGPs to thank for the survival of our fishes! Some of our favorites - sculpin, sea raven, ocean pout, and the Atlantic tomcod use AFGPs to tolerate our cold waters.

Cheers to the beauty of molecular evolution!

References

1. Barras, Colin. (2011, April 13). Polar Animals' Antifreeze has a Spiky Secret. Retrieved from https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028083-300-polar-animals-antifreeze-has-a-spiky-secret/

2. Logsdon, J. M., & Doolittle, W. F. (1997). Origin of antifreeze protein genes: A cool tale in molecular evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 94(8), 3485–3487.