Betalains and their Applications in Food Industry

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Introduction

Betalains are pigments which appears to be yellow and red, they originate from caryophyllales
plants where they replace anthocyanin. This type of pigment is mostly noticed in the flowers
petals and they categorized into two which include;
Betacyanins which entails the ruddy to purple betalain pigments, and the betacyanins present
in plants include probation pigments. And those betalains pigments appearing yellow to orange
are Betaxanthins. The indixcaxananthin, miranxanthin and vulgaxanthism are among those
pigments that are present in betalain pigments. This type of pigment is used as an ordinary dye
for food and it leads to urine red in color or beeturia and feces red in color to certain persons
who are not in a position of breaking it down
Betanin also is known as beetroot red is a red glyosidic food dye which is acquired from beets
while its aglycone is acquired when glucose particle is hydrolyzed. The pH determines the color
of betanin such that as the ph. increases, the color changes to blue-violet while when the ph.
falls between four and five it becomes bluish red.
A juice extract is used to acquire the betanin and the concentrated red one can even attain 300-
600mg/kg. Additional origins of betanins are opuntia cactus, swiss chard. The betanins are
commonly used in coloring an ice cream as well as powdered soft drinks. Other uses include as
a coloring agent, used as a soup as well as tomato and bacon products. When this particular
pigment is subjected to light, oxygen or heat, it degrades. It is used in frozen products with
short shelf life or those that are being sold while in dry condition (Jay, 2008, p. 143).
High-performance liquid chromatography

High-performance liquid chromatography which at the past was known as high-pressure
chromatography is a method applied when separating, identifying and quantifying each item on
the mixture (Pintelon, 2014, p. 219). This technique simply depends on pumps to pass a
pressurized liquid solvent having a sample mixture. This particular technique is used when
manufacturing biological and pharmaceutical products. When trying to differentiate this
method from the traditional one, HPLC has an operational pressure which is higher while in
liquid chromatography, in order to pass the mobile phase through the column, it depends on
the force of gravity. This method operates by introducing the sample of the mixture that needs
separation into the stream of mobile phase through the column at dissimilar velocities which
depends on the velocities (John, 2016, p. 67). The common mobile phases used include any
miscible water combination with numerous organic solvents, for example, methanol and
acetonitrile. High-performance liquid chromatography has theoretical parameters used in
describing the components separation into signal peaks when detected by instrumentation, for
example, mass spectrometer or UV detector (Gaya, 2011, p. 129). There are various types of
high-performance liquid chromatography and they include partition chromatography,
displacement chromatography, aqueous normal-phase chromatography, normal-phase
chromatography, displacement chromatography, size-exclusion chromatography, bio-affinity
chromatography and reversed-phase chromatography (Gilbert, 2013, p. 65).
Advantages of high-performance liquid chromatography.
 When compared to other chromatographic technique, the technique mentioned above
is extremely effective and quick. A higher resolution is delivered after the completion of