Pressurized liquid extraction of caffeine and catechins from green tea leaves using ethyl lactate, water and ethyl lactate + water mixtures

Ethyl-lactate (ethyl 2-hydroxy-propanoate) is a bio-renewable agrochemical solvent, very suitable and environmental benign for food applications, permitted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as pharmaceutical and food additive. In previous work, the authors demonstrated that pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) using ethyl lactate is a suitable alternative to remove caffeine from vegetal materials, e.g. green coffee beans and green tea leaves. The solubility of caffeine in ethyl lactate + water mixtures, at ambient temperature and pressure, exhibits a substantial increase for 60:40% ethyl lactate + water mixtures (data reported in this work). This result motivated the analysis of the effect of the ethyl lactate + water mixtures for the decaffeination target. Furthermore, in the case of green tea, the removal of caffeine reducing the extraction of catechins is desirable due to the adverse effects of caffeine on health, while catechins are high valued functional food ingredients. Thus, the use of ethyl lactate, water and ethyl lactate + water mixtures to attain this objective, i.e. the removal of caffeine form green tea leaves minimizing the extraction of catechins, was studied in this work. PLE was carried out in the temperature range 373-473 K and using different ethyl lactate + water mixtures. Extraction yield and recovery of key bioactive compounds (caffeine and monomeric catechins) were determined and compared, and the caffeine/catechins selectivity of the different solvents employed was estimated. High extraction yields were obtained with a mixture containing 25:75% of ethyl lactate + water, with values around 1.5 and 3.5 times higher than, respectively, the yields obtained with water and ethyl lactate. Yet, pure ethyl lactate proved to be the most selective solvent to extract caffeine from green tea leaves, minimizing the co-extraction of catechins, with a caffeine/catechins selectivity of 2.8 to 5.5 in the range 373-423 K. At these temperatures, with short extraction times (20 min) the recovery of caffeine is in the range 53-76% but only 26-36% of catechins present in the tea leaves were removed.

D. Villanueva acknowledges the predoctoral contract (JAE) given by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) of Spain. This work was financed thanks to AGL2011-29857-C03-01 (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad) and ALIBIRD, S2013/ABI-2728 (Comunidad de Madrid) projects.

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