Isolation and Characterization of Marine-Derived Collagens and Gelatins in the Perspective of Biomedical Application

The biodiversity and availability of species within the marine environment has been of increasing interest in the pursuit for new materials with biomedical potential. The increase of fish-related industries also brings about an increase in by-products without established valorization strategies besides feed applications, despite research having been showing that by-products generated from marine vertebrates and invertebrates can be used to obtain valuable compounds. In this chapter, we focus on collagenous materials (collagen and gelatin) similar to the ones found in human extracellular matrix, with advantages related with biological safety, low-cost production, and lack of ethnic and religious constraints, in contrast to mammalian counterpart. These macromolecules can be extracted from many sources, with influence in the quality and properties of materials, thus requiring a systematic characterization. All these aspects are herein addressed, along with some examples of the most recent applicability of marine-derived collagen/gelatin in the tissue engineering field.