EVALUATING THE EFFECT OF NON-THERMAL PROCESSING AND ENZYMATIC HYDROLYSIS IN MODULATING THE ANTIOXIDANT ACTIVITY OF NEBRASKAN GREAT NORTHERN BEANS

Great Northern Beans (GNB), a major pulse crop of Nebraska, are a rich source of dietary proteins and has the potential to release peptides with beneficial biological properties upon enzymatic hydrolysis. Thermal processing, such as boiling, is the most common way to process beans; it makes the beans palatable and also improves the accessibility of the proteolytic enzymes. Heat treatments destroy the naturally present essential bioactive components in beans like phytochemicals and could be prevented using an alternative non-thermal process. High Pressure processing (HPP), a non-thermal process and the most used alternative to thermal processing, can influence the storage proteins of beans and can modulate the enzymes\u27 accessibility to cleave proteins. Thus, the objective of the present study was to evaluate the efficacy of HPP of 600 MPa for 5 mins to produce antioxidant peptides from GNBs compared to boiling after alcalase-hydrolysis. Our results suggest that the degree of hydrolysis (DH) of the cooked beans were significantly higher compared to the HPP-treated beans, with no difference in the total peptide content. The oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) of the alcalase-hydrolysate of cooked beans have a higher antioxidant activity (370.9 ± 43.8 µmol TEAC/g) compared to that of HPP-treated beans (285.3 ± 53.2 µmol TEAC/g) where,TEAC is the Trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity. Therefore, the study concludes that boiling is a more efficient process than HPP to produce peptides with antioxidant activity but HPP is found to be effective in retaining the stability of phenolic compounds present in the beans. Advisor: Kaustav Majumde