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Yield and Phytosterol Composition of Oil Extracted from Grain Sorghum and Its Wet-Milled Fractions

¹Assistant professor, Department of Agricultural Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801. ²Lead scientist and research leader, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Eastern Regional Research Center, Agricultural Research Service, Wyndmoor, PA 19038. Current address: 360G, AESB, 1304 West Pennsylvania Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801. Names are necessary to report factually on available data; however, the USDA neither guarantees nor warrants the standard of the product, and the use of the name by the USDA implies no approval of the product to the exclusion of others that may also be suitable. ³Corresponding author. Phone: 217-333-9510. Fax: 217-244-0323. E-mail: vsingh@uiuc.edu.

Corn fiber contains an oil with high levels of three potential cholesterol-lowering phytosterol compounds. Little information is available about the levels and types of phytosterols in sorghum. In this study, phytosterols were evaluated in grain sorhgum and its wet-milled fractions and were compared with the phytosterols in corn. The study showed that sorghum kernels can provide a significant source of two phytosterol classes, free phytosterols (St) and fatty acyl phytosterol esters (St:E). Most of these phytosterols are concentrated in the wet-milled fiber fraction followed by the germ fraction. In addition to phytosterols, other lipid classes such as wax esters and an aldehyde (50% C28 and 50% C30) are also present in the sorghum oil. Comparison of sorghum and corn kernels show that corn has 72–93% more phytosterols than sorghum.