Abstract:
Astaxanthin (AXT) has poor stability and solubility in water due to its special chemical structure, which extremely restricts its application. In this work, the deep eutectic solvent (DES) based on thymol and lauric acid was used to dissolve AXT. The oil-in-water (O/W) emulsions were prepared with AXT-DES solution as oil phase, gelatin and arabia gum as water phase. Meanwhile, the morphology, stability, rheological property and bioaccessibility of the prepared emulsions were investigated. The results demonstrated that when the mass ratio of gelatin/arabic gum was 5 and the mass fraction of emulsifier was 1.5%, emulsion stability was better with bright red spherical droplets of 3.09 μm. The rheological result showed that emulsions had shear thinning behavior and gel-like properties. DES system had powerful ability for dissolving AXT, and the solubility of AXT in DES was 5.0% at 80 ℃. Moreover, the AXT retention rate in the encapsulated group was 83% after 20 d of storage, which was better than those in the control group (78%) and the reported studies (50.4%~79.25%).AXT bioaccessibility of the encapsulated group was 83%, which was 37% higher than that of the control group. It indicates that the AXT-loaded emulsion using DES system would provide a new strategy for AXT dissolution and encapsulation.
