Comparison of the lipid yield and fatty acid composition of some selected plant and animal materials extracted with four different approaches

Abstract

Lipid extraction and fatty acid analysis continues to be a crucial area in lipid science. The extraction of lipids from different materials has been under study for several years. One of its focus is to discover less harmful solvent mixtures and protocols that are efficient for lipid extraction and analysis. The aim of this work was to identify a solvent that is less toxic, efficient in extracting lipids and that can substitute chloroform in lipid analysis.

Four different approaches were used to initially extract lipids from twelve different sample materials of both plant and animal origin. The solvents used were chloroform/methanol (2:1,v/v), dichloromethane/methanol (2:1,v/v) and MTBE/methanol (10:3,v/v). Both single-step and double-step protocols were used for the lipid extraction. The extracted lipids were further analyzed for their fatty acid profiles with GC-FID in order to ascertain which fatty acids the different solvent mixtures best extracted.

At the end of this work, it was observed that MTBE/methanol solvent mixture coupled with the double-step protocol used for lipid extraction gave the highest total lipid yield for the range of sample materials analyzed. Furthermore, the analysis of the lipids extracted with the different solvent mixtures showed similar fatty acid profiles for each sample.