Comparative characterisation of fat fractions extracted from Egyptian and Chinese camel milk

Abstract

Historically, camel milk has an important role in human medicine and nutrition. In view of this, we performed an in-depth screening of milk fat fractions obtained from two different types of camels; Camelus dromedarius (C. dromedarius) and Camelus bactrianus (C. bactrianus). Different examination techniques (GC, FT-IR, DSC, and UPC2/Q-TOF-MS) were applied for the characterisation of milk fat fractions. The results revealed that C. bactrianus milk fat contained higher proportion of saturated fatty acids (SFA) with positional distribution at the sn-2 position. C. dromedarius had higher contents of monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA). The melting and crystallisation degrees of milk fats of C. bactrianus were higher than C. dromedarius. Moreover, more than 92 and 107 different TAGs in the C. dromedarius and C. bactrianus respectively were successfully identified using UPC2/Q-TOF-MS technique.