Abstract
This work has been intended to investigate the antioxidant properties of compounds extracted from seeds of Sterculia apetala (a plant from Central America) in order to add further results to the relatively poor existing literature on the beneficial properties of this plant. Different extraction methodologies were used such as batch or continuous extraction conditions using water or ethanol 50% as solvents. The kinetic study has allowed estimation of the effective diffusion coefficients in a continuous solid-liquid extraction, highlighting the strict dependence of the diffusion rate and temperature and kind of solvent, showing the highest diffusion rate with ethanol 50% at 60 °C. The comparison between different techniques and two solvents led to the selection of water as the best extraction solvent while batch mechanically-agitated extraction was the most efficient mode, with the benefits of use of an environmental-friendly solvent and reduction in process time to achieve a high amount of extracted phenolic compounds. The analysis techniques used were ABTS and Folin-Ciocalteau methods to investigate the antioxidant activity and quantify the Total Phenolic Content (TPC) respectively. Also, different fatty acids were extracted from Sterculia apetala seeds and analysed by Gas Chromatography in order to quantify other interesting chemical species besides antioxidants.
Highlights
Plants have always been consumed by mankind for their nutritional properties and medicinal effects due to the presence of the wide variety of secondary metabolites: terpenes and terpenoids, alkaloids and phenolic compounds [1]
The comparison between different techniques and two solvents led to the selection of water as the best extraction solvent while batch mechanically-agitated extraction was the most efficient mode, with the benefits of use of an environmental-friendly solvent and reduction in process time to achieve a high amount of extracted phenolic compounds
The antioxidant activity (ABTS) of the collected sample is higher for the extraction at 60 ◦ C with both the solvents and are higher than the results obtained from samples of Sterculia scaphigera (39.53 ± 4.53 μmol/g) in a previous study used by Sha Li et al for comparing the antioxidant properties of 223 plants [16]
Summary
Plants have always been consumed by mankind for their nutritional properties and medicinal effects due to the presence of the wide variety of secondary metabolites: terpenes and terpenoids (around 25,000), alkaloids (around 12,000) and phenolic compounds (around 8000) [1]. Many food ingredients contain unsaturated fatty acids which are quite susceptible to deterioration by oxidation and the addition of selected antioxidants can be a valuable solution to this problem [3] Their protective effect causes a huge delay in the degradation processes taking place after a certain period of storage, prolonging the conservation of quality and dramatically increasing the shelf-life of foods. The concentration in the liquid phase versus time data have been usually measured and fitted to theoretical models under appropriate hypotheses to yield values of the diffusion kinetic parameters Factors such as temperature and flow rate influence the extraction yield and the extraction kinetics of a continuous extraction process (where the solvent flows continuously, “dragging” the polyphenols from the matrix) [11]. Related antioxidant properties investigated the fatty acid composition of the seeds reporting good extraction yield of cyclopropenoic [12,13].
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