Spills of M/V Hebei Spirit on 7th December 2007 caused a seriously damage to the ecosystem of Korean coast. Of these, microbial communities (i.e., attached benthic micro-algae) were reported to be sentive to the environmental change so it can be used for ecological risk assessment. Our experiment was designed to examine the ecological risk assessments for oil pollutant using benthic attached algal community on the artificial substrates of acrylic plates. Field monitoring in the culture system was conducted in Jangmok Bay. The abundances of attached micro-algae on artificial substrates gradually increased with increasing of sampling times. Among them, diatoms were the most important colonizer of coastal water, with the genera Cylindrotheca and Navicular most abundant. In particular, developed the culture system has correctly measured qualitative and quantitative abundance of attached micro-algae because same acrylic plates as artificial substrates were used. Thus, this culture system may be directly applied to the ecological risk experiments of microbial community structure from oil pollutants.

In this study, the antimicrobial, antioxidant activities and α-glucosidase inhibitory activities of Amphidinium carterae ethanol extract (AE) was evaluated for using as a functional food ingredient. Chlorella ethanol extract (CE) was used to the comparison as a control. Anticancer activities of the AE and CE were analyzed by HepG2 and HT-29 human cancer cell. The AE showed antimicrobial activities for all tested bacterial strains. Whereas, CE showed antimicrobial activities for several tested bacterial strains only. The CE showed higher total phenolics contents, DPPH and ABTS radical-scavenging activities (47.36 mg/g, 22.42% and 28.58%, respectively) than those of AE (8.88 mg/g, 20.16% and 17.69%, respectively). AE showed anti-diabetic effect on α-glucosidase inhibitory activity with dose-dependantly manner. The cell viability of AE (125 μg/mL) on HepG2 and HT-29 human cancer cells were 38.12% and 11.27%, respectively. It was demonstrated that ethanol was efficient solvent for extracting functional components from A. carterae. These results indicated that AE can be described as a good candidate for using as a functional food ingredient.