Mechanical Disintegration and Particle Size Sieving of (Irish Moss) Gametophytes and Their Effect on Carrageenan and Phycoerythrin Extraction.

To better understand the migration properties of hybrid carrageenan from the seaweed tissue during carrageenan extraction, the effect of increasing the seaweed surface area by the mechanical disintegration of gametophyte chips was studied under various temperature and time extraction conditions. Dried seaweed chips were milled by a rotor beater mill and classified into eight different size fractions by sieving with varying mesh sizes from 50 to 2000 μm. During extraction at 22 °C, the red color of the filtrate increased significantly with the decreasing particle size of the fraction, correlating with the increasing phycoerythrin concentration (from 0.