Valorização de subprodutos agroindustriais: potencial utilização em indústrias alimentícias e de biotecnologia

Abstract

Brazil has its economy strongly based on agribusiness, highlighting, among its numerous branches, the food industries. However, during the agro-industrial processing steps, large quantities of byproducts are generated, resulting in problems to the environment. Aiming to present a more noble usage for grape pomace and stems by-products, generated by the wine agro-industry, and apple pomace byproducts, coming from jellies processing, the biomasses were characterized by physical-chemical and chromatographic analysis. The acid hydrolysis of these wastes was aimed to provide the fermentable sugars for later identification and quantification by High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC-RI) and (HPLC-DAD) for the evaluation of the nutritional and biotechnological potential. The by-products showed high carbohydrate content ranging from 36.47 to 42.36 and 55.01 g 100.g-1 for grape pomace, apple pomace and grape stems wastes, respectively. Despite being vegetable biomasses, the by-products still exhibit significant protein content. The sugars identified and quantified by HPLC are glucose, xylose, arabinose and cellobiose. Among the wastes used in this study, the apple pomace showed the best results for the employed hydrolysis methodology, since it had the highest number of identified and quantified sugars, given the available standards, being xylose the one with higher concentration levels (7.40 g.L-1). The HPLC-DAD Analysis enabled the identification and quantification of the toxic compounds furfural and hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), which comes from the degradation of hexoses and pentoses present in hemicellulose matrix. Nevertheless, the amount of these compounds in the hemicellulose hydrolysate is not considered to not represent microbial growth inhibition risks. The fermentable sugars levels suggest that these biomasses have the potential to be exploited as a substrate in fermentation processes and indicated that it is possible to value the regional industrial byproducts, making them suitable as components in the food and biotechnology industries.