Abstract
Duckweed, a small flowering plant which comes from Lemnaceae family, has been rising in popularity to many researches and applications for its numerous valuable functional properties. One of its special features is fast growing plant and easily adapted to various types of regions which makes it attractive to be manipulated in many applications including in biofuel production, waste water treatment and also for pharmaceutical and medicinal purposes. Pectin is the common component found in plant cell wall and it has been used as food additive for its capability to gel, emulsify and stabilize food products. Several requirements for commercial pectin such as galacturonic acid content (GalA) and degree of amidation have been regulated. Studies have proven that duckweed have significant amount of pectin which make it as a potential source of gelling agent in food industry. However, the structural properties of pectin from duckweed need to be investigated, in order to ensure if they meet the regulated requirements for industrial production. It is also to determine the suitability of duckweed pectin utilization in different type of food products since pectin of different sources have different structural characteristics, thus exhibit different gelling capability. This present review discusses on the potential of pectin from duckweed species to be utilized as food additive with gelling function in food products. Several extraction methods also have been reviewed, which each of them showed different efficiency and affect the extracted pectin characteristics.
Highlights
The increasing demand and expectation on food safety and quality in the past few decades had promoted the utilization of additional substances in food products
Pectin, which is the common component found in plant cell wall, is one of the substances that has been widely used in food industry for its various beneficial function in improving the quality of food products
In the attempt of finding novel sources of pectin to be utilized in food processing, other factors need to be considered including the suitability of its consumption into specific food products and the consumer acceptance since pectin from different sources will give different effect on the appearance and texture of food products
Summary
The increasing demand and expectation on food safety and quality in the past few decades had promoted the utilization of additional substances in food products. For all the above reason, finding new alternative pectin sources is a good effort in attempt to fulfil the increasing request for pectin in every demanding industry. Acetyl groups can be present in the GalA residues located at O-2 and/or O-3, which become the measurement for the degree of acetylation (DA) of the pectin [16] Those differences in pectin structural characteristics would affect its cohesiveness, viscosity, gelation and emulsifying properties [17, 18]. A recent study observed that methyl content and acetyl content in pectin structure play role in affecting the emulsifying function of pectin of sugar beet pulp [19]
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