Lipid Analysis of PUFA in the New Millennium and Future Trends

Abstract

Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), especially highly unsaturated fatty acids such as DHA and EPA have a significant potential of being functional fatty acids for preventing myocardial infarction, psoriasis, bronchial asthma, and other diseases. The PUFA analysis of lipids has provided fundamental information for evaluating these functional lipids for understanding the human metabolism. Structure lipids with different positional distributions of PUFA in acylglycerol are also needed in order to identify the health benefits of the lipid. However, no single and simple method has been completely established to analyze the triacylglycerol molecular species of the marine lipid. The authors have developed a new standard method for DHA analysis by NMR. The DHA content and relative quantification of the n-3 fatty acids in the marine lipid were accurately and rapidly obtained using 300-500 MHz proton NMR. Recent interests have been summarized as the health benefits since it has been recognized that there are many difficulties in the analysis of geometric and positional isomers of conjugated linoleic acid. Furthermore, in the field offish oil utilization, the undesirable flavor of the product should be restricted to prevent odors as reversed grassy smell from PUFA. Analysis of fish flavor was examined by the method of solid phase micro extraction (SPME) for identifying flavor compounds from oxidized fish oil by heating with micro oven and other conditions. For the utilization of fish oil after getting the precise analysis of PUFA, how to prevent the oxidation is important. Inositol hexaphosphate as one of the natural antioxidants has the potential for the preventing of fish oil oxidation. Lipid analysis should be undertaken with the methods of non-destructive and observational analyses in the new millennium. The future trends of lipid analysis might include the key words of rapid, accurate, less solvent, and non-destructive instrumentation. © 2001, Japan Oil Chemists' Society. All rights reserved.