Separation Technology and Value-Added Phytochemistry

Dr. F. William Collins, Study Leader

Objectives

1. To characterize the chemical, physical or functional attributes of small-grain cereals, soybean and corn influencing market utilization and/or with potential value-added features.

2. To develop new or improved technologies to identify and/or isolate value-added components with potential impact on crop utilization.

Rationale

Producing high-quality, disease-free small-grain cereals, soybean and corn will ensure maintenance of their market shares in eastern Canada. However, the agriculture and agri-food industries also need to diversify both their domestic uses and export opportunities to ensure market expansion. Producer organizations and entrepreneurial industries are all looking into new opportunities for crops. Some of these opportunities will arise by development of new approaches to value-added features of the crop that have not yet been accessed. Other venues will be developed by improving the crop with conventional breeding or molecular technologies.

In all cases, quality traits of grains or plants that impact on the value of the crop for current markets or for diversification have to be characterized. Technologies to monitor the various grain or crop traits have to be implemented, improved or developed. Increasing knowledge and technology to improve product characteristics, whether these products are grains, their components and/or structures, will add to the wealth of the Canadian agri-food industry.

There are other opportunities to be explored with development of new separation technologies and improvements or refinements of existing fractionation processes to access new active oat extractives. For example, primary products produced by the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Oat Processing Patent technology including bran, flour and extractives increase the value of one tonne of oat groats from $400 to $4,000. Further improvements and modifications to the products, and novel purification technologies resulting in secondary products such as -glucan and modified protein and starches, further raise this value to about $26,000 per tonne. Compounds recently found in low concentration in oats could have extremely valuable properties as nutraceutical or pharmaceutical ingredients and products. These molecules may represent tertiary products, again raising the value of the groats as a natural resource of rare phytochemicals to levels of $50,000-100,000 per tonne. These compounds, for which no standards are currently available, have to be isolated in substantial amounts, to serve as quality control standards, structurally characterized and their distribution within the oat grain determined. Smart technologies for their purification have to be developed.

Saponins and isoflavones from soybean have been labelled as nutraceuticals. Both types of molecules can be found in the seed coats. Isoflavones also have agrochemical value as efficient nodulation-inducing signal molecules in a wide variety of legume and nitrogen-fixing forages but due to scarcity of reliable sources are prohibitively expensive. There is a potential to use these processing co-products as a starting point for further recovery of value from the crop through efficient extraction and fractionation technologies.