Extracting Carotenoids from Corn Industry Coproducts

Abstract

Two experiments were completed to develop methods for extracting xanthophylls from corn industry co-products, post fermentation (PF) corn oil and corn gluten meal (CGM). A solid phase extraction (SPE) method was used to fractionate a xanthophyll-rich portion of PF corn oil by varying conditioning and eluting solvents used with a diol SPE column. Conditioning with dichloromethane yielded highest xanthophyll fractionation, 86.5%. The elution solvent selected did not impact fractionation based on a two-way ANOVA. Supercritical fluid extraction of xanthohpylls from CGM was modeled using a Box-Behnken design, varying temperature, pressure, and co-solvent ratio. The optimum conditions were determined to be 40 °C, 6820 psi, and 15% co-solvent, which would extract 85.4 µg lutein/g CGM, 2.6 times more lutein than an ethanol and chloroform: dichloromethane solvent extraction. Co-solvent was the most influential extraction parameter and increasing it further could yield higher xanthophyll recovery. With further studies, this work has industrial potential.