Abstract
Plant cell wall suspensions are widely present in daily food, such as soups, dressings, and sauces. Cell walls of edible plants are made up of an intricate biopolymer network of mainly cellulose microfibrils, pectins, and hemicelluloses. The current study aims to obtain a better insight in cell wall biopolymer interactions and their relation to physical functionalities of cell wall suspensions. In addition to standard thermal and mechanical treatments to effectively disrupt the cell wall, enzymes were added to hydrolyze specific classes of biopolymers. Incubation with pure cellulases, pectinases, or hemicellulases resulted in suspensions with different physical properties. The effect of the enzymes were measured on the rheology over an 8 h period, and the microstructure was investigated by cryo-scanning electron microscopy. Homogenization of the enzyme-treated system was further investigated. It was observed that there was an increase in the storage modulus after homogenizing the enzyme-treated samples. For example, after homogenizing the 8 h pectinase-treated sample, the storage modulus went from 30 to 70 Pa. This was due to an increase in the particle size and, hence, the volume fraction. The enzyme treatment weakened the cell wall; the additional homogenizing step caused the cell wall to break along the defects caused by the enzyme. This resulted in distinctly different cell wall microstructures based on the type and extent of the treatment.
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Acknowledgments
This research was financially supported by the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Union under the Marie Curie Initial Training Network ‘HST FoodTrain’ (Grant agreement 264470). The authors would also like to thank Caroline Remijn for the cryo-SEM analysis.
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Sankaran, A.K., Nijsse, J., Bialek, L. et al. Effect of Enzyme Homogenization on the Physical Properties of Carrot Cell Wall Suspensions. Food Bioprocess Technol 8, 1377–1385 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11947-015-1481-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11947-015-1481-4