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Published on: July 6, 2012
Intervention mechanism of amphiphilic natural sweeteners on starch chain dynamic behavior: Computational and
Fan Wang1, Jianfu Shen1, Baiyi Lu1
1College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Key Laboratory for Quality Evaluation and Health Benefit of Agro-Products of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Key Laboratory for Quality and Safety Risk Assessment of Agro-Products Storage and Preservation of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China.
Abstract:
Amphiphilic natural sweeteners (i.e. steviol glycosides (STE) and glycyrrhizic acid (GA)) have been adopted to improve the quality of various starchy products, which can fundamentally be characterized as the intervention of the former in the chain dynamic behavior of the latter. However, these phenomena and related mechanisms still lack systematic insights. Herein, dual-temperature molecular dynamic simulations combined with experimental analysis were used to tandemly investigate the intervention of sweeteners in six types of chain dynamic behaviors that are strongly correlated with starch properties, including unwinding, movement, long/short-term reassociation, rearrangement, and depolymerization. The results show that STE and GA both promoted the chain unwinding and movement, and also retarded the chain short/long-term reassociation and rearrangement. Besides, GA exhibited a greater role than STE in facilitating chain unwinding and movement. Peculiarly, GA (0 %-40 % w/w) collaborated with starch to form a new microstructure, especially at high content (≥ 20 % w/w), which endowed starch with exceptionally high hardness (15.50 gf→189.36 gf) and hardening rate (2.72 gf/d→17.76 gf/d), and also placed a physical barrier to retard starch depolymerization (slowly digestible starch: 11.26 %→20.62 %). This work contributes data and theoretical support for the development of starch/amphiphilic natural sweetener composite matrices.
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