The influence of salt concentration on acid-induced gel formation and gel properties of silver carp myofibrils was investigated. Results showed that silver carp myofibrils were slightly soluble regardless of salt concentration in the presence of D-gluconic acid-δ-lactone (GDL). The increase of myofibrils solubility in the absence of GDL was mainly caused by the dissociation of myosin and actin, as evidenced by SDS-PAGE. Myosin and actin were the major protein components involved in acid-induced aggregation of silver carp myofibrils. Ca 2+ -ATPase activity and surface reactive sulphydryl (SH) contents of myofibrils with GDL addition were much lower than those in the absence of GDL. Significant decrease in total SH content of silver carp myofibrils in the present of GDL at salt concentration of 0.3 mol/L NaCl was observed, suggesting the contribution of disulphide bonds to the acid-induced gel formation. The gel properties of acidinduced silver carp myofibril gel were highly dependent upon salt concentration, and acidified myofibril gel with high gel strength could be obtained with addition of 1.7% − 2% NaCl.Keywords: silver carp, myofibrils, acid-induced gelation, salt concentration, influence *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: xuys@jiangnan.edu.cn (Y. Xu), xiaws@jiangnan.edu.cn (W. Xia)
IntroductionMyofibrillar proteins (MP), accounting for about 55% to 60% of the total muscle protein, are generally referred as salt soluble protein (Sun and Holley, 2011). Gelation is an important functional property of myofibrillar proteins, which is mainly responsible for the textural properties of surimibased products. Gel formation involves partial denaturation of protein followed by irreversible aggregation which results in a three dimensional network (Chawla et al., 1996;Sun et al., 2011;Venugopal et al., 1994). The gel formation of proteins is influenced by several factors, such as type of muscle, protein concentration, pH, ionic strength, temperature, and pressure (Sun et al., 2011;Totosaus et al., 2002). Among these factors, pH and ionic strength are two important factors that can affect the dissociation state and charge distribution of protein amino acid residues in the solution and can alter the protein intermolecular electrostatic interactions, and thus affect the protein molecular structure and gel properties (Lin and Park, 1998). The nature and extent of gelation is highly pH-and salt-sensitive due to the importance of electrostatic interactions of myofibrils (Kristinsson and Hultin, 2003a).It is well known that salt concentration is one of the key factors in determining the gel formation of muscle protein and the physical properties of the gel. Increasing ionic strength was reported to decrease the electrostatic repulsive forces partially via charge screening at a given pH (Kristinsson and Hultin, 2003b). Sodium chloride is the salt commonly used in restructured meat products. High concentration (2% to 3%) of sodium chloride is usually added to fish mince to solubilize the myofibrillar proteins in...