Authors:
Juan Pablo Costa
1
;
Horacio Castellini
2
;
Patricia Risso
3
and
Bibiana Riquelme
1
Affiliations:
1
FCByF, Universidad Nacional de Rosario and Instituto de Física Rosario (CONICET-UNR), Argentina
;
2
Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina
;
3
FCByF and Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina
Keyword(s):
Milk protein, Acid gel, Gel structure, Digital images, Glucono-delta-lactone, Bovine caseins.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Bioinformatics
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Image Analysis
Abstract:
Sodium caseinate (NaCAS) is a very useful ingredient in food industry because of its nutritional and functional properties. Acidification produces a gel structure as a result of the dissociation and aggregation of caseinic fractions. Formation of these protein gels can be made by the slow reduction of pH through the addition of glucono-delta-lactone (GDL). Depending on its concentration and temperature, hydrolysis speed of GDL can affect the grade of hardness and elasticity of the formed gel. This study evaluated the effect on the formation and structure of protein gels induced by different relations of GDL through analysis of digital images obtained in an inverted conventional microscope and a confocal microscope. The entropy, smoothness and variance decrease with the added GDL quantity, but the uniformity increases. Results confirm that the texture depends on gelification speed, which is directly related to the amount of added GDL. This digital image analysis technique using conve
ntional or confocal microscopy is, therefore, suitable and very useful for the texture analysis of acid gels formed by different GDL/NaCAS rates.
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