Corn starch producers

Specialty Products. Enzymes, because of their high substrate specificity and stereospecificity, are ideal for producing special compounds required by the food and pharmaceutical industries (36). By all measures, the conversion of corn starch, produced by wet milling, to glucose and fructose has been the most successful commercial operation (37). More than ten billion pounds of fructose are produced and used by the food industry each year. 

You may have noticed that most soft drinks contain high fructose corn syrup Corn starch is hy drolyzed to glucose which is then treated with glu cose isomeraseto produce a fructose rich mixture The... 

Figure 6. FTIR spectra of components used to produce the starch-containing plastics used in this study (a) low density polyethylene (PE) (b) poly(ethylene-co-acrylic acid) (EAA) and (c) corn starch.

Oxidized Starch Production Methods. Multiple methodologies were utilized to produce the corn starch products of hypochlorite and periodate oxidation. Ultimately only three of these procedures were selected as yielding functional product and will, therefore, be the only methods to be outlined here. 

Cellulose is a carbohydrate that supports or protects plants. Like starch, it is made of repeating units of glucose. The bonds between the glucose molecules in cellulose are different from the bonds in starch. This matters a great deal, because enzymes in the human body can break the bonds in starch to produce glucose, but they cannot break the cellulose bonds and make glucose from it. This is why cereal or corn (starch) can be eaten, but not wood (cellulose). 

Currently, most biorefineries are based mainly on a single product line with potentially one or two byproducts. Thus, an ethanol plant produces ethanol from corn starch, with distiller s grain as a byproduct. Greater product flexibility and, consequently, greater opportunities for profitability would derive from a plant producing a variety of alcohols, especially higher alcohols whose market prices range from 0.77 to 1.87/kg. 

Today, most ethanol is made from corn starch. After separation from com by wet milling, starch slurry is thinned with alpha-amylase and saccharified with amyloglu-cosidase. The resulting sugar solution is fermented by Sacchammyces yeast. Modem US ethanol plants use simultaneous scarification, yeast propagation and fermentation. The major portion of fuel-grade ethanol is now produced by continuous fermentation,... 

Jennings SD. The Effect of Corn Maturity on the Quantity and Quality of Starch Produced by Wet-milling [M.S. Thesis], Ames, IA Iowa State University 1996. 

The quantity of barley starch produced around the world is very little when compared to starch production from corn, wheat, rice, potato or tapioca. There are only a few processing plants around the world that produce starch concentrate or purified starch from barley. Barley starch concentrates containing up to —78% (dry basis) starch are now produced in North America by milling and air-classification of barley grains. Milling disintegrates the grain into fine particles and air-classification separates them on the basis of differences in density, mass and projected area in the direction of air... 

Other methods, alternative methods of producing lump-free CWS starch have been described. One employs heat-moisture treatment of a mixture of granular starch, a surfactant containing a fatty acid moiety and (optionally) a gum.214 A process for making a corn starch product giving a uniform viscous dispersion when added to boiling water employs heating a mixture of starch, surfactant and water, followed by microwave radiation.215 Compositions that gel at low solids concentrations were prepared by complexation of starches of moderate (20-30%) amylose content with emulsifiers.216... 

Com, tapioca, potato and wheat starches are the most commonly used starches in the US and Europe. In the US, 95% of the starch is made from corn, an amount representing 3.4% of the total com crop, excluding that wet-milled to make sweeteners (see Chapter 22) and alcohol11124 (see Chapter 2). In Europe, about 60% of the starch produced is made from com and about 20% each from potato and wheat.12 In select regions, rice, sorghum, arrowroot, sago and other starches are also used. The relative utility of these starches in foods is a function of differences in viscosity, stability to... 

Commercial dextrins are specifically the oligomers of starch. White dextrins, so called because of their visual appearance, are produced from a 30-40% suspension under the mildest possible hydrolysis conditions (79-120°C for 3-8 h in 0.2-2% H2S04 or HC1). Yellow dextrins and British gums are the partial hydrolysates at higher time-temperature integrals. Maltodextrins, dextrose equivalent20 5-19, derive from controlled enzyme or acid partial hydrolysis of gelatinized corn starch. The 20-24 dextrose equivalent hydrolysates tire com syrups (Appi, 1991). 

Biobased polymers from renewable materials have received increased attention recently. Lactate is a building block for bio-based polymers. In the United States, production of lactic acid is greater than 50,000 metric tons/yr and projected to increase exponentially to replace petroleum-based polymers. Domestic lactate is currently manufactured from corn starch using the filamentous fungus Rhizopus oryzae and selected species of lactic acid bacteria. The produced lactic acid can then be polymerized into polylactic acid (PLA) which has many applications (Hatti-Kaul et al., 2007). However, so far, no facility is built to use biomass derived sugars for lactic acid production. More research needs to be done to develop microbes using biomass derived sugars for lactate production. 

Heat-stable amylases are frequently used in both the United States and Japan to produce syrups with a high fructose content from corn starch. 

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