Studies On Beta-Carotene And Sterol In Dunaliella Salina

The Dunaliella salina is a kind of single-celled microalgae without a rigid cell wall, which is growing in hypersaline environment such as salt lakes, saltern, sea and so on. The D.salina has been increasingly concerned in the fields of food, healthcare and medical applications in last10years, due to its ability to produce and accumulate large amounts of beta-carotene, glycerol, protein, vitamin and other nutrients. The D.salina can accumulate much higher concentrations of beta-carotene than other algae, fruit and vegetable plant, exceeding10%of its dry weight, makes it a potential source of nature beta-carotene.In this article, the extract methods of beta-carotene from D.salina have been discussed. To achieve the maximum extracting yield of beta-carotene from D.salina, the orthogonal experiment was employed based on single-factors tests.The optimum extraction condition appears as follow: extraction solvent is petroleum ether, extraction time is4.5 hours, extraction temperature is55℃, solid-liquid ratio is1:10, and the extraction rate is up to66.77%. Under the optimum extraction condition, D.salina beta-carotene is extracted, according to the property of beta-carotene and the result of TLC test, the extracts have been purified by utilizing column chromatography, and the mobile is the mixture of petroleum ether/ethyl acetate. Purified product was separated by HPLC, which contains four beta-carotene isomers,13-cis,15-cis,9-cis and all-trans.Sterols in Dunliella extracts were separate by column chromatography. According to the GC-MS result,7kinds of sterols were detected, they are Cholesterol, Dehydroergosterol, Ergosterol, Fungisterol,7-Dehydroporiferasterol, Chondrillasterol,22-Dihydrochondrillasterol respectivelyWith the developments and applications of D.salina products, much attention has been focused on the safety of these products. Nowadays, the ubiquitous contamination of PAEs has seriously been concerned the food safety and health of human beings. In this paper, we determined the content of several common PAEs in D.salina extraction by GC-MS. The result shown that D.salina is a reliable healthcare product which contains scarcely PAEs.