Liposomes and Protection of Amino Acids, Vitamins, Minerals

Introduction

Amino acids, vitamins, and minerals are essential substances for humans. Therefore, many foods add these substances to complete the body's nutritional supplement. Amino acids, vitamins, and minerals are essential substances for human beings. Therefore, many foods add these substances to complete the body's nutritional supplement. However, many amino acids, vitamins, and minerals are susceptible to oxidative denaturation or photolysis caused by external environmental influences such as light, temperature, or oxygen, and suffer great losses during food processing, thus failing to achieve the purpose of supplementing the body's nutrition, which greatly limits their application in food. Embedding these substances can play a good role in protecting and reducing losses, in which embedding liposomes as the material is a great advantage.

Advantages

The ability of liposomes to encapsulate both lipophilic and hydrophilic substances, their degradability in living organisms, their good biocompatibility, and their relatively small size compared to other carriers means that they are easily and uniformly dispersed throughout the food interior. When wrapped in liposomes, the stability of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals is improved, losses during processing are reduced, and they are more easily absorbed by the human body, prolonging the effective shelf life of these substances and improving the quality of food by masking some abnormalities.

Examples

Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is very unstable and can be easily oxidized during processing and storage. After preparation into liposomal microcapsules, the stability of vitamin C can be greatly enhanced. The effective vitamin C content of this liposomal product remains above 50% after 50 days of storage at 4°C, while all vitamin C in its free state is degraded after 20 days. In addition, liposomal capsules of vitamins may improve product stability to some extent even in the presence of degraded substances (e.g. copper, ascorbate oxidase, and lysine).

For vitamin D and vitamin A, liposome encapsulation also improved their stability. In a neutral environment and at 4°C, free vitamin A and vitamin A in the cache system are completely degraded within two days, while vitamin A after incorporation of liposome protection has only a 20% degradation rate after the eighth day, and the liposome protection is even more significant if stored away from light.

Liposome encapsulation technology can also protect minerals, such as calcium ions, magnesium ions, and iron salts. Calcium ions encapsulated by liposomes can avoid the coagulation effect of soy protein in soy milk production, and the calcium content in calcium-added soy milk even exceeds that of natural milk. Some producers encapsulate magnesium ions in liposomes to promote dietary nutritional balance. The direct addition of iron salts to dairy products produces a metallic odor and can cause lipid peroxidation and color changes, but encapsulation in liposomes can mask such changes and improve the quality of dairy products containing iron salts.

About Us

Liposome encapsulation is an important step for the preparation of liposome drugs. The cargo is usually loaded during this step, strongly influencing the packaging load. BOC Sciences liposome platform provides you with the best liposome encapsulation services. We can select specific phospholipids and techniques to prepare liposomes based on the cargo or the release conditions.