#is435 CRITICAL FLUID OPTIONS FOR THE EXTRACTION AND ENRICHMENT OF NUTRACEUTICALS

The recent development and commercialization of nutmceutical and functional food ingredients from a variety of agricultural resources has provided a unique opportunity for the utilization of critical fluid technology. Aside from the environmeutal betrefits of usiug critical fluid media as a process agent, there is also the appeal to the consuming public from the perspective of ingredient safety, for consuming products obtained using only carbon dioxide, water, or GRAS (generally regarded as safe) solvents. In this presentation, we report our latest research utilizing a variety of extraction, fractionation, or reaction options to produce products for commercial use. Thermal gradient fractionation cohunns using several different modes of operation have been used to enrich steroi ester components from a variety of seed oil sources, as well as to remove unwanted components, such as fatty acids, from the resultant extracts. Precise control of the variables effecting fractionation column performance were critical for obtaining the reported enrichments, since many of the nutritionally-beneficial ingredients are present in only small quantities in the starting seed-based materials. Higher enrichment of the trace nutritional ingredients can be achieved by using the preparative mode ofsupercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) in conjunction with extraction. This concept was demonstrated for the combined SFVSFC enrichment of sterol esters and phospholipids, using a fonn of gradient elution chromatography in which SC-CO, is the principle component of the mobile phase. Finally. the exploitation of reaction chemistry using critical fluid media was used to directly synthesize steroi or fatty acid esters, for incorporation into food matrices. This is conveniently accomplished by using enzymatic catalysis in order to preserve the natural and benign nature of the synthesis process and resultant product., which can be conveniently combined with downstream critical fluid extraction and fractionation