EXTRACTION AND BIOANALYSIS OF ULTRASONIC ASSISTED PAKISTANI CULTIVAR PRUNUS DULCIS SEED: AN OPTIMIZATION STUDY

Abstract

Prunus dulcis (almond) is known to produce nutritional oil and the wide range of their food products. Level based experiments were designed for ultrasonic assisted extraction (UAE) technique by using multivariate Taguchi method. Two independent parameters: solvent seed ratio and sonic power were used to study the L9 orthogonal array model and to investigate the detailed effect of independent parameters towards maximized yield effect (MYE) whereas, extracting solvent (hexane), extracting time (30minutes) and extracting temperature (500C) were the dependent parameters in the present study. Solvent seed ratio 10:1 and 300W sonic power were found optimal conditions to get 50.70% oil. Ultrasonic assistance methodology was found good for oil extraction and 2.0% more oil fraction were obtained by this method as compared to conventional Soxhlet extraction. The optimization conditions were confirmed by signal to noise ratio (SNR) while adopting larger the better (LTB) expression and ANOVA used for the significant contribution of the independent parameters(91.72% and 8.282%). Antioxidant (IC50 38.2μg/μl) and antimicrobial activities of optimal conditioned UAE almond oil predicted the oil fate as value added special commercial oil.