Vol. 4, Issue 5 (2015)

Author(s):
Mandeep Kataria, Navneet Kaur, Ritu Narula, Kuldeep Kumar, Swati Kataria, Neelam Verma

Abstract:
Asparagine regulates the equilibrium of the central nervous system and is required for the development of brain. On the other hand, Asparagine forms acrylamide in baked food by reacting with reducing sugars at high temperature (Millard reaction), which is highly carcinogenic. Storage of fruit juices at 37 °C causes a major decrease in the content of asparagine, therefore, it can also be used as quality insurance parameter in fruit juices. Due to these significances of monitoring asparagine, the current work deals with the development of a biosensor for determining asparagine in fruit juice and comparison of various plants for L-asparaginase. Among these plants Solanum nigrum have higher titer of enzyme and it is novel source of L-asparaginase. For the development of the biosensor, L-asparaginase is co-immobilized with Phenol red in TEOS-Chitosan disc and fiber optic spectrophotometer is used as a transducer. The developed fiber optic asparagine biosensor has a very good response time of 5 min. with 10-1 to 10-10 M linear range of detection. The developed biosensor was applied on various fruit juices.