The Use of Powdered Lipase for Industrial Esterification of Food Oils

Lipase catalyzed trans-esterification is one of the excellent methods to obtain functional foods oils. Nevertheless, this techniques has been put intopractice only in limited areas. It is necessary to design the reaction system as simply as possible to develop it for versatile use such as hydrogenation, chemical esterification and fractionation. For the immobilization processing, other substances are required as a carrier, by which the specific activity of the enzyme is inevitably decreased. Thus, we investigated the trans-esterification reaction in consideration of the point that a compact reaction system can be designed by using powdered lipase. Optimal reaction temperature was higher for lipase powder with lower water content. The optimal reaction temperature of the lipase powder was 85t and its activity was 20% of the activity of the optimal temperature, even at the higher temperature of 130t . The half-life of the lipase powder activity was determined to be 380 hour by repeated reaction at 80t . The method developed by us has been put into practice in the industrial production of several kinds of functional food oils such as healthy oil consisting of Medium-chain Fatty acids and Phytosterol ester.