An Effective Method of Isolating Honey Proteins.

Aleksandra Bocian,Marcin Jaromin,Justyna Buczkowicz,Jaroslav Legáth,Konrad Kamil Hus

doi:10.3390/molecules24132399

Abstract

Honey is a natural sweetener composed mostly of sugars, but it contains also pollen grains, proteins, free amino acids, and minerals. The amounts and proportions of these components depend on the honey type and bee species. Despite the low content of honey protein, they are becoming a popular study object, and have recently been used as markers of the authenticity and quality of honey. Currently, the most popular methods of protein isolation from honey are dialysis against distilled water, lyophilization of dialysate, or various precipitation protocols. In this work, we propose a new method based on saturated phenol. We tested it on three popular polish honey types and we proved its compatibility with both 1D and 2D polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) and MS (mass spectrometry) techniques. The elaborated technique is also potentially less expensive and less time-consuming than other previously described methods, while being equally effective.

Highlights

Honey is a natural product manufactured by honeybees from flower nectar or honeydew
Protein using the the commercial kit revealed some differences in process
Protein concentration concentrationmeasurement measurement using commercial kit revealed some differences in efficiency (Figure process efficiency (Figure 1)

Summary

Introduction

Honey is a natural product manufactured by honeybees from flower nectar or honeydew. It is a natural sweetener, as it is mostly composed of sugars: glucose, fructose, sucrose, and maltose; it contains pollen grains, proteins, free amino acids, vitamins, flavors, minerals, and volatile compounds [1,2,3]. The amounts and proportions of these components are affected by various factors. These factors may be classified as: natural—such as type of plant and geographic region—and industrial—such as storage period [1]. Differences in protein composition of honey may be the result of different bee origin and flower nectar used by them [1,4]. The proteins present in honey are widely used as markers of honey authenticity and adulteration tries [6,8] and as a quality indicator [8,9]

Methods

Results

Conclusion