Curcumin encapsulation in zein-rhamnolipid composite nanoparticles using a pH-driven method

By Lei Dai, Hualu Zhou, Yang Wei, Yanxiang Gao, D. McClements. Food Hydrocolloids, 2019

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Zein is widely used to encapsulate non-polar bioactives due to its ability to form protein nanoparticles with hydrophobic interiors. In this study, a simple pH-driven method, which does not use organic solvents, was employed to fabricate zein-rhamnolipid composite nanoparticles. An alkaline zein solution (pH 12.0) was mixed with an acidic rhamnolipid solution (pH 2.0), which led to the spontaneous formation of composite nanoparticles (pH 7.0). The possibility of using these nanoparticles to encapsulate and deliver curcumin was then studied. Nanoparticle properties, such as size and charge, were mainly determined by the mass ratio of zein-to-rhamnolipid used. The nanoparticles formed were spherical and relatively small (d ≈ 100 nm) according to dynamic light scattering and transmission electron microscopy. Nanoparticle suspensions remained stable from pH 5 to 9 but aggregated under more acidic conditions. At neutral pH, the nanoparticles were stable at low ionic strengths (

Subfields: Food Science, Molecular Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3af898ffe85d0f7d1b7a8ac954b3049431ea920