Removal of addedvalue Alkaloids from food aqueous streams

Ana Filipa Nascimento Quintino

Key information

Authors:

Ana Filipa Nascimento Quintino (Ana Filipa Nascimento Quintino)

Supervisors:

Frederico Castelo Alves Ferreira (Frederico Castelo Alves Ferreira); Teresa Sofia Araújo Esteves (Teresa Sofia Araújo Esteves)

Published in

November 24, 2021

Abstract

This thesis focuses on two food products, lupin beans and bitter oranges, that could help release some of the pressure on agriculture and natural resources. These food products, have good nutritional value and as crops, have low water consumption and are very resistant to temperature changes and soil acidity. The main issue with these are the toxic compounds that make them not edible (synephrine in bitter orange and Lupanine in Lupin beans). This toxicity causes bitter oranges to be wasted and the need to spend large amounts on the industrial food processing of lupin beans to make its consumption safe. The mentioned toxic compounds are added value compounds that the pharmaceutical industry uses. The present work considers the use of adsorptive separation methods to remove and recover these toxic compounds with pharmaceutical properties, allowing the safe consumption of the food while seeking to decrease its environmental impact. Lupanine binding percentage for commercial polybenzimidazole (PBI) polymer and three derived PBIs were studied for different solutions, the treated PBIs showed improved results compared to the commercial PBI. Optimizations, adsorption isotherms and binding kinetics were also studied, and several recovery solvents were tested to recover lupanine after the binding. Bitter Oranges amines were extracted with water and the flavonoids were extracted with ethanol a preliminary binding assay was performed with a synthetic mixture of bitter orange juice (from which the acidic resins were the best to bind synephrine) the extracted compounds were analysed and quantified (493 ppm of synephrine).