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![Schematic diagram of the determination of the ricinoleic acid (polyglycerol polyricinoleate [PGPR]) content in commercial food products.](profile/Chunxia-Su-2/publication/373159101/figure/fig3/AS:11431281255434449@1719420109485/Schematic-diagram-of-the-determination-of-the-ricinoleic-acid-polyglycerol.png)
Schematic diagram of the determination of the ricinoleic acid (polyglycerol polyricinoleate [PGPR]) content in commercial food products.
Source publication
Polyglycerol polyricinoleate (PGPR) is a synthetic food additive containing a complex mixture of various esters. In recent years, there has been a growing trend to use PGPR‐stabilized water‐in‐oil (W/O) emulsions to replace fat in order to produce low‐calorie food products. In this respect, it is essential to comprehensively characterize the PGPR m...
Citations
... Polyglycerol polyricinoleate (PGPR) is produced by the esterification of polyglycerol and condensed castor oil fatty acids. The latter are mainly ricinoleic acid ((9Z,12 R)-12-hydroxy-9-cis-octadecenoic acid, 80-90%), but also contain oleic (C18:1: 3-8%), linoleic (C18:2: 3-7%), and stearic acid (C18:0: 0-2%) (Su et al. 2023). These castor oil fatty acids are condensed into polyricinoleate estolides via the hydroxyl group on the ricinoleic acid (Wilson et al. 1998; Bastida-Rodr� ıguez 2013; Mortensen et al. 2017). ...
... The use of the latter polymerisation reactions can produce polyglycerol products with a lower percentage of cyclic components. PGPR as a food additive at the permitted or reported use levels poses no safety concerns (Mortensen et al. 2017;Younes et al. 2022;Su et al. 2023). Therefore, it is used in preparation of W/O or W/O/W emulsions for potential food applications and improvement of the properties of chocolate products, such as their moulding properties, tolerance to the thickening effect, and limitation of fat bloom (Bastida-Rodr� ıguez 2013; Santos et al. 2015;Freire et al. 2016;Serdaro� glu et al. 2016;Zhu et al. 2016;Eisinaite et al. 2017;Herzi and Essafi 2020) As a synthetic food additive containing a complex mixture of various esters, it is essential to comprehensively characterise the molecular species composition of PGPR. ...
PGPR is an emulsifier (E476) widely used in the food industry. In this study, a gas chromatography-flame ionisation detection (GC-FID) method was developed for the quantitative characterisation of the polyglycerol composition of PGPR. The method was validated to analyse quantitatively the polyglycerol species in neat PGPR products and in PGPR samples present in a lipid matrix. This method consists of saponification, acidification and petroleum ether extraction to remove interfering fatty acids, neutralisation, silylation and finally GC-FID analysis. Phenyl β-D-glucopyranoside was used as internal standard as sorbitol proved unsuitable due to its susceptibility to interference from Na/K chloride during silylation. The response factors of glycerol and diglycerol towards phenyl β-D-glucopyranoside were determined using pure standards, while response factors of polyglycerols with a degree of polymerisation of at least 3 could be reliably estimated according to an effective carbon number (ECN) approach. The validity of the method applied to PGPR samples was further supported on the basis of a mass balance considering the experimentally determined polyglycerol and fatty acid content. Moreover, recoveries of di-, tri-, tetra- and pentaglycerol were more than 95% for various PGPR samples added to two different lipid matrices at 2 wt% and 5 wt% concentrations. Furthermore, the method proved to be very repeatable (with relative standard deviation values below 2.2%). On the other hand, the inevitable presence of glycerol in the lipid samples caused fouling of the detector and column overloading, requiring frequent cleaning of the detector and trimming off part of the column.
