Lipase-catalyzed selective enrichment of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in acylglycerols of cod liver and linseed oils: Modeling the binding affinity of lipases and fatty acids

Present study employed molecular modeling method to elucidate the binding affinity of lipases with fatty acids of different chain lengths; and investigated the effects of lipases positional and fatty acids specificity on omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (ω-3 PUFAs) enrichment in cod liver and linseed oils. Among the lipases studied, molecular modeling showed the active sites of Candida rugosa lipase (CRL) had a low C-Docker interactive energy for saturated (SFA) and monounsaturated (MUFA) fatty acids which predicted CRL to have highest preferences to selectively hydrolyze resulting in efficient enrichment of ω-3 PUFAs. Verification experiments showed the SFA and MUFA in the acylglycerol fraction includes monoacylglcyerols (MAG), diacyglycerols (DAG), and triacylglycerols (TAG) of CRL-hydrolyzed cod liver oil decreased from the initial 25.21 to 16.88% and 45.25 to 32.17%, respectively. In addition, CRL-hydrolyzed cod liver oil demonstrated 88.36% of ω-3 PUFAs enrichment. The regio-distribution of fatty acids in CRL-hydrolyzed cod liver oil were not significantly different than that of cod liver oil indicating the ω-3 PUFAs enrichment was due to fatty acids selectivity and not positional selectivity of CRL.