Extraction, quantification, characterization, and application in food packaging of chitin and chitosan from mushrooms: A review.

The application of chitin in food systems is limited by its insolubility in some common solvents and poor degradability. Hence, it is deacetylated to obtain chitosan, an industrially important derivative with excellent biological properties. Fungal-sourced chitosan is gaining prominence and industrial attraction because of its superior functional and biological properties, and vegan appeal. Further, the absence of such compounds as tropomyosin, myosin light chain, and arginine kinase, which are known to trigger allergic reactions, gives it an edge over marine-sourced chitosan in food and pharmaceutical applications. Mushrooms are macro-fungi with a significant content of chitin, with many authors reporting the highest content to be in the mushroom stalks. This indicates a great potential for the valorisation of a hitherto waste product. Hence, this review was written to provide a global summary of literature reports on the extraction and yield of chitin and chitosan from different fruiting parts of some species of mushrooms, different methods used to quantify extracted chitin, as well as physicochemical properties of chitin and chitosan from some mushroom species are presented. Critical comparisons of reports on chitin and chitosan from mushrooms and other sources are made. This report concludes with an exposition of the potential application of mushroom-sourced chitosan for food packaging application. The reports from this review provide a very positive outlook regarding the use of mushrooms as a sustainable source of chitin and chitosan and the subsequent application of chitosan as a functional component in food packaging.

Progress in research and applications of cassava flour and starch: a review.

The cassava flours and starches have elicited great use in the food and non-food industry. The diversity in cassava genotypes accounts for differences in end-product properties, and would require characterization of cassava varieties for suitability of culinary and processing. This review showed that screening criteria of cassava cultivars end-user properties include proximate contents, amylose content, structural, swelling, gelatinization and pasting characteristics, including freeze-thaw stability properties of cassava-derived flours and starches. Literature shows that the physiochemical properties vary with genetic factors (i.e. genotype). In this review, the amylose content was found to be the main genetic trait for discriminating the cassava varieties for gelatinization and pasting processes including resistant starches. Moreover, cassava derived raw materials (flours and starches) were found to have various application in baking, edible film, syrup, glucose, alcohol, and soups production.