Physicochemical and rheological properties of Acacia Catechu exudate gum

Abstract

Over 900 species of Acacia trees are found on earth; most of them produce gums. But gums obtained from Acacia senegal and Acacia seyal were explored scientifically and used commercially compared to other species. Acacia Catechu is one of the gums-producing species of the Acacia family found in the India and Indian subcontinent and has not been studied extensively compared to commercial Acacia gum. The present work is aimed to study the physicochemical, rheological properties of Acacia catechu gum (ACG) and compare them with commercial Acacia senegal gum (CAG). ACG is a 1.17 × 105Da molecular weight polysaccharide and is mainly composed of galactose (29.8%), arabinose (19.5%), and rhamnose (18.2%). Further functional property studies showed that ACG has alike film-forming property as CAG. The rheological study indicates that ACG also gives less viscosity at a higher concentration as CAG. Where the effect of NaCl, sucrose, glucose, and fructose addition in gum solution of flow behavior also showed a similar effect on the flow behavior of ACG as showed on CAG. The obtained results help in understanding the behavior of Acacia catechu gum and its possible uses.

Keywords

• Exudate gum
• Molecular weight
• Rheology
• Emulsification capacity
• Film-forming properties