Determination of the activities of lipase collected from plant sources

Abstract

Lipases are ubiquitous in nature and are produced by several plants which are available in Bangladesh. These enzymes exhibit several important features, such as low cost and easy purification, which make their commercial exploitation as industrial enzymes as a potentially attractive alternative.In this study, nine samples of plant origin (banana peel, orange peel, pumpkin seed, winter melon seed, mustard seed, eggplant, lentil, bean seed and soya meat) were screened to identify the presence of lipase enzyme in them. The result showed that except banana peel all the other plant sources were containing lipase.The study also conducted the assay of colorimetric micro-determination of fatty acidsreleased to copper salt enabled the activity of crude enzyme extract on olive oil as substrate under different environment condition providing range of pH from pH 5.0- pH 8.0 and temperature range was from 25˚C to 40˚C. Four lipase containing plant samples (coconut, soya meat, bean seed and pumpkin seed) were experimented to determine their lipase activities to specify their acid and heat stability. The result showed, the coconut lipase was heat stable andsuitable for alkaline environment; only the bean seed lipase was active in both acidic and alkaline environment, but it was highly heat sensitive.The soya meat lipase was only active at pH 8.0, was suitable in alkaline medium and highly heat sensitive, and the pumpkin seed lipase was heat sensitive and suitable for alkaline medium.The coconut enzyme acted maximally at 38°C and had optimum pH of 8.0. So, the coconut enzyme can be used at alkaline environment at this temperature in different food industry such as dairy industry, baking industry, tea industry, oil and fat industry and so on for flavor enhancement, emulsification, cheese ripening and many other purposes. The bean seed lipase acted in both the acidic and alkaline medium, so this enzyme can be used in both the high and low acidic pH medium.This study should be further experimented for identifying the purification and isolation of coconut and bean seed lipase enzymes (at least) in future for using these enzymes in the industrial fields in a great amount