Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1
Food Science Department, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt
2
Toxicology and Food Contaminants Department, National Research Center. Dokki, Gi-za, Egypt
Abstract
Corn is economically considered the most im-portant crop produced all-over the world. Tassels of corn plants (male spike collected after harvest-ing the crop) were chemically analyzed for their phenolic content and other compounds. The con-tents of phenolic fractions and other compounds especially those having value added were extract-ed by using different solvents i.e. water, ethanol, methanol, acetone, hexane, chloroform, butanol, petroleum ether and methylene chloride separately .Chemical compounds of the ethanolic extract were fractionated and identified by GC-MS. Antiox-idant activities of corn tassels fractions were de-termined as oxygen radical absorbance capacity with 1,1-Diphenyl -2- Picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) in ad-dition their efficiency at different concentrations on sunflower oil was evaluated .The antifungal activity of corn tassels extract fractions (extracted by using water and ethanol separately ) at different concen-trations ( i.e. 2,5 and10%) against different strains of fungi was tested . The inhibitory action for this fungus sp. was determined by using media broth. The results indicated that ethanol was the best solvent followed by methanol and water for extrac-tion of total phenols (i.e., 1575.0, 1125.0 and 737.5 mg/l, respectively) from ground corn tassels. Anti-oxidant capacities of corn tassels were ranged from 83.0 to 85.2, 69.9 to 83.7, 69.8 to 80.4, 22.2 to 49.1 and 14.8 to 19.3 for ethanol, methanol, acetone, butanol and water extracts, respectively. The induction period values proved that ethanolic extract of corn tassels possessed an antioxidant activity for lipid oxidation by two times compared to Tert.-Butyl Hydro-Quinone (TBHQ). Results also showed that water extract of corn tassels caused more inhibition to fungal growth than ethanol ex-tract. The rate of fungal growth inhibition was clear-ly recorded for Fusarium sp., Penicillium sp., A. parasiticus, A. flavus, and A. niger. The inhibition reached to more than 75% which could be attribut-ed to the presence of high content of imidazol in addition to polyphenols and flavonoids compounds in the corn tassel fractions. These results prove the utilization of these natural extracts as antioxidant agents as well as their ability to inhibit the growth of fungi producing toxins and consequently could be used in different purposes in food processing instead of synthetic compounds.
Keywords
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