Recovery of mango starch from unripe mango juice

Abstract

Unripe mango contains an important amount of starch that has been conventionally isolated by the wet milling of pulp/pomace. Nevertheless, wet milling is costly and requires a vast amount of water that leads to an increased environmental footprint. In this project, mango starch was isolated using centrifugal sedimentation of cold-pressed juice or wet milling of dry pulp, and the starch fractions were comparatively investigated in terms of starch yield, purity and morphology. Furthermore, since the efficiency of extraction and starch properties might be dependent on the mango cultivar, the molecular structure and functionality of juice-extracted starches from two widely cultivated varieties (Haden and Palmer) were comparatively investigated. Centrifugal sedimentation showed 26 and 9% higher starch yields than conventional wet-milling for Haden and Palmer, respectively. Juice-extracted starches presented a lower degree of damage and aggregation than wet-milled counterparts. Mango starches presented C-type crystalline pattern and subtle differences gelatinization temperatures and molecular weight (ranging from 1.1 to 1.7 × 108 gmol−1).