Valorization of Bioactive Compounds from Shrimp Shells: Comparison between Ultrasound-Assisted and Subcritical-Water Extractions

: In the last years, shrimp consumption has increased resulting in massive amounts of wastes . In this study, different extraction techniques, namely ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE), subcritical water extraction (SWE) and conventional extraction (CE), were tested to evaluate their efficiency to recover bioactive compounds from shrimp shells. SWE performed at 200 °C was the extraction technique that allowed the highest recovery of polyphenolic and carotenoid compounds (5.43 ± 0.17 mgGAE/g dw and 59.9 ± 1.0 μg carotenoids/g dw) as well as the highest antioxidant activity by ABTS and FRAP assays (7.93 ± 0.01 and 4.35 ± 0.31 mgAAE/g dw). These results demonstrated the potential of shrimp shells, which can be further incorporated in other products.