Abstract
Ferulic acid in ester form has shown a stronger ability in ameliorating certain pathological conditions and inhibiting lipid oxidation. In present study, a solvent-free and reduced pressure evaporation system was developed for lipase-catalyzed synthesis of 2-ethylhexyl ferulate (2-EF) from ferulic acid and 2-ethylhexanol. A Box-Behnken design with response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) was selected to model and optimize the process. Based on the yields of 2-EF, reaction temperature was shown to be the most important process factor on the molar conversion among all variables. The residual values and the coefficient of determination (R2) calculated from the design data indicated that ANN was better than RSM in data fitting. Overall, the present lipase-catalyzed approach for 2-EF synthesis at low reaction temperature in a reduced pressure evaporation system shows high 2-EF production efficiency. Notably, this approach can reduce the enzyme denaturation and ferulic acid oxidation that usually occur during long-term biosynthetic operations at high temperature.
Highlights
Ferulic acid (FA) belongs to the family of phenolic acids and is very abundant in grains, fruits and vegetables
Immobilized lipase Novozym® 435 (10,000 U/g; propyl laurate units (PLU)) from Candida antarctica B (EC3.1.1.3) supported on a macroporous acrylic resin was purchased from NovoNor disk methanol and acetic acid were purchased from the Sigma Chemical Co
The present study demonstrates for the first time that immobilized C. antarctica lipase (Novozym® 435) is able to synthesize 2-ethylhexyl ferulate (2-EF)
Summary
Ferulic acid (FA) belongs to the family of phenolic acids and is very abundant in grains, fruits and vegetables. FA esters possess better inhibitory effect on lipid oxidation than FA [18] Enzymatic biosynthesis of these compounds has attracted much attention in recent years, and it may be a better approach in comparison to conventional chemical processes [19,20,21,22,23]. The boiling point of the component liquids is lower in a reduced pressure evaporation system than that in the atmosphere at the same temperature, suggesting that the byproducts with relative low vapor pressure physical characteristics are more prone to be eliminated in the reduced pressure system This may increase the efficiency of the lipase-catalyzed reaction. RSM and ANN were employed to investigate the effects of different reaction variables (reaction time, reaction temperature, and enzyme amount) on the response (yield %), and to obtain the optimal conditions to solve the problems of long reaction time and low yield of FA esters
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