Analysis of Pectin in Different Citrus Fruits and Evolutionary Relationship

Abstract

Pectin is a polysaccharide present in fruit cell walls can be extracted from fruit wastes obtained after processing. The objective of the present investigation was to study the potential of citrus fruit peels to be a source of pectin as it is of great importance in food and medical industry. This study aimed at comparing the characteristics of different pectin and to see which one is more suitable for industrial application. Pectin was extracted using alcohol precipitation method from peels of grapefruit, mousambi, and orange so that the use of pectin can be applied to a wider range. According to the study, the pectin extracted by mousambi on wet basis (17.1%) was higher in comparison to the pectin extraction of orange and grapefruit. The pectin can be used in many fields like food and medicines so the improvement in quality and production is very important. MicroRNAs have the main function of guiding the base pairing with target mRNA to negatively regulate its expression for gene silencing via mRNA clevage. In the present study we also found the phylogenetic relationship among the citrus fruits by multiple sequence alignment of microRNAs stem-loop sequence from the miRbase database of the citrus fruits and after getting phylogenetic tree we got the common ancestors. In recent years, the center of production has moved to Europe and to citrus- producing countries like Mexico and Brazil. Further changes of structure and location of the industry continue, but are constrained by the need for large capital investment to setup Plant of economic size, and the need for a large-scale source or sources of raw material.