In Ivory Coast, there are three different purple maize varieties whose culture is confined to Katiola (Central-North) area. These varieties locally called "Violet de Katiola" are the most widely grown and prized maize in this area because of its important socio-cultural character, its good organoleptic quality, its market value and its therapeutic virtues. The present paper aimed at evaluating physicochemical properties and fatty acid composition of these purple maize oilseeds in order to explore their nutritional and industrial potentialities. Physicochemical properties of the seed oils were: specific gravity, 0.90 to 0.91; refractive index (25 °C), 1.456 to 1.459; iodine value, 102.90 to 124.34 g I2 /100 g ; peroxide value, 4.23 to 4.99 meq.O2/kg ; free fatty acids, 0.74 to 0.86 %; acid value, 2.50 to 2.99 mg of KOH/g and; saponification value, 138.96 to 170.36 mg KOH/g. Results revealed that these oilseeds contained high amount of unsaturated fatty acids mainly consisting of linoleic (42.86 to 45.16 %) and oleic acids (33.27 to 34.98 %) which were desirable from the nutritional and health viewpoints. Palmitic acid was the major saturated fatty acid with contents ranged from 15.51 to 17.06 %. The oilseeds showed high PUFA/SFA ratios suggesting their ability to reduce cholesterol levels and coronary heart diseases in body. All these interesting characteristics confirm their usefulness for different nutritional and industrial applications.

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