Amino acids potatoes

In recent years, a number of workers have published amino acid analyses of the sweet potato (38, 43, 35, 22, 18). The overall picture is that the sweet potato amino acid pattern is of good nutritional quality but that the variability of individual amino acids both within the same cultivar and across cultivars is very high. For example, Walter et al. (44) reported that with the exception of aromatic amino acids, every essential amino acid has a score of less than 100 in one or more cultivars. The amino acid score is defined as the g of amino acid in 100 g of test protein divided by the number of g of that amino acid in the FAO/WHO reference pattern times 100. Bradbury et al. (22) showed that, for the same cultivar, environmental effects on the amino acid patterns is significant. For three cultivars, they found a mean percent standard deviation for all amino acids of 24.2,... 

One of the commercial methods for production of lysine consists of a two-stage process using two species of bacteria. The carbon sources for production of amino acids are corn, potato starch, molasses, and whey. If starch is used, it must be hydrolysed to glucose to achieve higher yield. Escherichia coli is grown in a medium consisting of glycerol, corn-steep liquor and di-ammonium phosphate under aerobic conditions, with temperature and pH controlled. 

A report by Bressani et al. (3J7), which evaluated the nutritional value of diets based on starchy foods and beans, indicated that for the rat, sweet potato protein was of poor nutritional quality. When methionine was added to all diets to raise sulfur amino acids, sweet potato still required the largest amount of supplementation with bean flour to maintain animal weight (Table II). 

Walter et al. (38) measured the protein efficiency ratio (PER) of flour prepared from sweet potatoes which were cooked in a drying oven. Because the PER is determined on the basis of a diet containing 10% protein, the Jewel and Centennial sweet potatoes used in this study were stored until sufficient starch had metabolized to increase crude protein content to 11.25% (dry basis). When the flour was fed to Sprague-Dawley strain rats, the corrected PER values were 2.22 and 2.00 for Centennial and Jewel cultivars, respectively, compared to 2.50 for casein. Centennial had the highest PER value of the two cultivars because its NPN content was lower. The net effect of increased NPN content is to lower the amount of essential amino acids as a percentage of the total nitrogen and thus decrease the PER value. 

The literature on concentrated sweet potato protein is sparse. Amino acid patterns for sweet potato protein isolates have been reported by three groups (16, 45, 46). One report showed that when compared to the FAO standard (47), no amino acids were limiting. The other reports showed total sulfur amino acids and lysine to be limiting (Table III). The patterns indicate a nutritionally well balanced protein. The improvement in nutritional quality, when compared to amino acid patterns from whole sweet potato, is due to the fact that whole sweet potatoes contain substantial amounts of NPN, which consists mainly of nonessential amino acids. This effectively dilutes the EAA and lowers the amino acid score. 

Feeding studies with the rat as the test animal verified the high nutritional quality indicated by the amino acid pattern (45). Using isolates and concentrates prepared from Jewel and Centennial cultivars, PER values were equal to that of casein (milk protein) (Table IV). Examination of the amino acid patterns of sweet potato protein and casein revealed that both contained... 

Horigome et al. (3J5) reported a PER of 1.9 for protein recovered from an industrial sweet potato starch facility. They were able to increase the PER to 2.5 by supplementing the diets with lysine and methionine. A portion of these amino acids were either destroyed or made biologically nonavailable by the processing operation. The possibility also exists that these amino acids were limiting in the cultivars studied. 

U. Roessner Tunali, J. Liu, A. Leisse, I. Balbo, A. Perez Melis, L. Willmitzer, and A. R. Femie, Kinetics of labelling of organic and amino acids in potato tubers by gas chromatography mass spectrometry following incubation in 13C labeled isotopes. Plant J. 39, 668 679 (2004). 

Potato type II (Potll) inhibitors are disulfide-rich peptides of approximately 50 amino acids in size. They were first discovered in leaves, seeds, and other organs of Solanaceae and are a source of much interest as plant defense proteins. Recently, Barta et analyzed expressed sequence tag (EST) and genomic data and discovered 11 genes that code for Potll inhibitors in various monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants. Potll inhibitors are expressed as large precursor proteins that contain up to eight sequence repeats of the inhibitor precursor. In one particularly fascinating case from the ornamental tobacco (N. data), the precursor adopts a circular permuted structure.Barta et al. observed that genes outside the Solanaceae family seem... 

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