Protein identification and in vitro digestion of fractions from Tenebrio molitor

By L. Yi, Martin Van Boekel, S. Boeren, C. Lakemond. European Food Research and Technology, 2016

99 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The nutritional value of insect protein is evaluated not only in amino acid composition, but also in protein digestibility. The general amino acid composition of Tenebrio molitor has been reported before, but limited knowledge is available on its digestibility. The objective of this study was to investigate in vitro protein digestibility of whole T. molitor larvae, a water-soluble fraction (supernatant) and water-insoluble fractions (pellet and residue), and to identify which proteins were present in the fractions studied. The digestibility of the supernatant fraction (~80 %) was much higher than that of pellet (~50 %) and residue (~24 %) after in vitro gastroduodenal digestion as was determined using the o-phthaldialdehyde (OPA) method. More proteins were digested after pepsin/pancreatin digestion than after only pepsin digestion. The most abundant proteins in the supernatant were hemolymph protein (~12 kDa), alpha-amylase (~50 kDa, a putative allergen), and muscle proteins (e.g. actin 30–50 kDa) in the pellet fraction as determined from LC–MS/MS and SDS-PAGE. In conclusion, the proteins in the soluble fraction that contained hemolymph proteins were more easily digestible than the insoluble, muscle protein-containing fractions.

Subfields: Genetics, Insect Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20108dcc3c2222a3b18097c311838200704226ca

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Citations in the corpus

Unlocking the biological potential of proteins from edible insects through enzymatic hydrolysis: A review (2017, background): “Recently, Yi et al. (2016) showed using LC-MS/MS that pellets (non-water 334 soluble extracts) obtained following aqueous extraction of T. molitor mainly contain muscle 335 proteins (i.e. actin, myosin, tropomyosin and troponin).”
Effect of Tenebrio molitor larvae meal on growth performance, in vivo nutrients digestibility, somatic and marketable indexes of gilthead sea bream (Sparus aurata) (2017, background): “Some trials have been conducted in vitro (Marono et al., 2015; Sánchez-Muros et al., 2015; Yi et al., 2016) but to our knowledge, no trial was performed to evaluate the in vivo digestibility in gilthead seabream.”
Tenebrio molitor meal in diets for European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax L.) juveniles: Growth performance, whole body composition and in vivo apparent digestibility (2016, background): “Some trials have been conducted in vitro (Marono et al., 2015; Sánchez-Muros et al., 2015; Yi et al., 2016) but to our knowledge, only one trial was performed in vivo, and showed a decrease of protein apparent digestibility coefficient (ADC) when TM was included at a 50% level in rainbow trout…”