Correlation between amino acid racemization and processing conditions for various wheat products, oil seed press cakes and lignin samples

Abstract

The occurrence of d-amino acids in native and processed plant products is brought into context with the harshness of their treatment condition. It was found that already a small increase in processing harshness such as the milling efficiency of wheat straw or the increased pressure and duration of pumpkin seed oil extraction leads to traceable changes in the overall amino acid content as well as the racemization rate of free and protein bound amino acids. In the top position of our process harshness scale lies the strong alkali and heat-induced extraction of polyphenolic compound lignin from wood and other cellulose-rich plant fibers, e.g. wheat straw, during paper production. Since lignin accumulates in large quantities and its transformation into value-added “bio” products necessitates the recovery of native, functionally preserved lignin, milder pulping methods gain increasing interest. An unexpected drawback of such mild extraction conditions is however the high nitrogen content of such lignin products, which further increase with increasing mildness of the pulping procedure. The presence of amide bands in the FT-IR spectra of such mildly processed lignin has revealed that this nitrogen originated from co-extracted proteins and peptides. The total amino acid content as well as the free amino acid content and the degree of racemization was determined by gas chromatography–ion trap mass spectrometry (GC–Iontrap MS) employing enantiomer labeling for quantification. Cross-determination of the average amino acid content was calculated from nitrogen values obtained by elemental analysis and correlation factors were calculated from measured and calculated data. Since those amino acids with two chiral centers, such as isoleucine, threonine and hydroxyproline exhibit the highest possible diversity in terms of their relative amount to one another as well as their internal enantiomer distribution, this set of two-centered amino acids provided very distinct amino acid pattern, which proofed to be characteristic for the type of plant material as well as the harshness of the different processing conditions.