Sunflower protein concentrates and isolates prepared from oil cakes have high water solubility and antioxidant capacity.

SALGADO, PABLO R; MOLINA ORTIZ, SARA EUGENIA; PETRUCCELLI, SILVANA; MAURI, ADRIANA N

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN OIL CHEMISTS SOCIETY (JAOCS)

SPRINGER

Año: 2011 vol. 88 p. 351 - 360

0003-021X

Increasing the applications of industrial residues is of interest, therefore in the present study sunflower residual pellet from a local oil manufacturing company was used to obtain soluble protein-enriched products with different content of phenolic compounds.  All the processes evaluated allowed to obtain protein isolates and concentrates with water solubility higher than 75% in spite of differences in chemical composition, color,  and physicochemical properties (surface hydrophobicity, thermal stability, and polypeptide composition). Since no process led to a complete extraction of phenolic compounds ?because of their strong interaction with proteins- all the products exhibited antioxidant properties, which depended on the concentration of such compounds. While phenolic compounds are responsible for the strong color of the products, this property seemed to be more related to the procedure used to obtain the products than to the concentration of these compounds. The results presented demonstrate the value of sunflower industrial oilcake as a source of proteins with high solubility, good physicochemical and antioxidant properties which can be used as functional ingredients in human feeding.