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Highly Efficient Enzymatic Synthesis of 2‐Monoacylglycerides and Structured Lipids and their Production on a Technical Scale
Author(s) -
Pfeffer Jan,
Freund Andreas,
BelRhlid Rachid,
Hansen CarlErik,
Reuss Matthias,
Schmid Rolf D.,
Maurer Steffen C.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
lipids
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.601
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1558-9307
pISSN - 0024-4201
DOI - 10.1007/s11745-007-3084-y
Subject(s) - candida antarctica , yield (engineering) , chemistry , lipase , polyunsaturated fatty acid , organic chemistry , catalysis , eicosapentaenoic acid , glycerol , docosahexaenoic acid , enzyme , fatty acid , materials science , metallurgy
We report here a two‐step process for the high‐yield enzymatic synthesis of 2‐monoacylglycerides (2‐MAG) of saturated as well as unsaturated fatty acids with different chain lengths. The process consists of two steps: first the unselective esterification of fatty acids and glycerol leading to a triacylglyceride followed by an sn 1,3‐selective alcoholysis reaction yielding 2‐monoacylglycerides. Remarkably, both steps can be catalyzed by lipase B from Candida antarctica (CalB). The whole process including esterification and alcoholysis was scaled up in a miniplant to a total volume of 10 l. With this volume, a two‐step process catalyzed by CalB for the synthesis of 1,3‐oleoyl‐2‐palmitoylglycerol (OPO) using tripalmitate as starting material was established. On a laboratory scale, we obtained gram quantities of the synthesized 2‐monoacylglycerides of polyunsaturated fatty acids such as arachidonic‐, docosahexaenoic‐ and eicosapentaenoic acids and up to 96.4% of the theoretically possible yield with 95% purity. On a technical scale (>100 g of product, >5 l of reaction volume), 97% yield was reached in the esterification and 73% in the alcoholysis and a new promising process for the enzymatic synthesis of OPO was established.