A Convenient and Industrially Viable Route to Separate Lipophilic and Hydrophilic Fractions of Seabuckthorn Pulp and Analysis of Their Activities

Abstract

Traditionally, the extraction of oil from the Seabuckthorn pulp was done by first separating out the juice by mechanically pressing the berries followed by centrifugal separation of oil from the juice by density difference. But the pressed pulp cake still contained both the oil and the juice to some extent. Thus, a complete separation of the lipophilic (oil) and hydrophilic (juice) fractions of the pulp was not achieved. The process that we present in this work separates both the oil and juice fractions very discretely by directly processing the pulp as a whole in an alcoholic medium to separate the lipophilic and the vitamin-rich hydrophilic fractions embedded in the pulp. Moreover, we achieve this separation without employing expensive machines like mechanical presses and high-speed centrifuges. Further, the extraction of the oil from lipophilic part has been done by both the solvent and supercritical extraction methods followed by a comparative study using HPLC analysis of the bio-actives obtained from both the methods. We found that the carotenoids extracted better with the solvent extraction, while sterols extracted better with the supercritical extraction. The overall yield of the oil and the bio-actives was comparable to that of the earlier methods. The aqueous alcohol soluble fraction was evaluated for vitamin C, total acids and reducing sugars. We conclude that our process is convenient, cost-effective and good in terms of yield and recovery of the bio-actives, which makes it industrially applicable. This was endorsed by a successful pilot study trial of a 10 kg batch conducted at SSP