Effect of Sterculia foetida Oil on Gossypol Discoloration in Cold Storage Eggs and the Mechanism

THE appearance of olive colored yolks in eggs laid by hens fed cottonseed meal was reported in 1917 by Lamon and Lee. This discoloration ranges, according to Heywang, Denton and Bird (1949), from olive green or light chocolate brown to nearly black. Earlier work indicates that the coloration developed because of the free gossypol in the meals (Heywang, Bird and Altshul, 19SS). However, Frampton, Pic-colo and Heywang (1961), recently re-ported that there was poor correlation be-tween intensity of coloration in the yolk and the free gossypol content of the meals fed. It is apparent from these reports that the discoloration attributed to gossypol may be due to a combination of other factors with gossypol. That pH has an effect on the chromogen is well known. The recent work by Masson, Vavich, Heywang and Kem-merer (1957), that Sterculia foetida oil or sterculic acid produced the typical pink dis-coloration in eggs attributed to cottonseed meal, and the observations by Shenstone and Vickery (1959), that sterculic acid also caused an increase of pH in yolks in stored eggs, makes it reasonable to assume that this oil would have an effect on the dis-coloration caused by gossypol