Characterization of corn oil, soybean oil and sunflowerseed oil nonpolar material

Normal phase preparative and semi-preparative liquid chromatography were used to isolate fractions of varying polarity from corn, soybean and sunflowerseed oils. Reported here is the composition of one fraction, less polar than triglycerides, determined by isolating the individual «peaks» of a semi-preparative separation using as starting material the mix of compounds obtained from a large scale separation. These peaks were then analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography (LC) gas chromatography (GC), mass-spectrometry (MS) with and without GC, in both electron impact (EI) and chemical ionization (CI) modes, and carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Semi-quantitative data were obtained for many of the components found in these semi-preparative isolates including hydrocarbons, steryl esters, triterpenyl esters, phytyl esters and geranylgeranyl esters. The weight percent and composition of the preparative fraction differed substantially among the three oils. Corn oil had the greatest amount, at 1.25% of the starting oil, and was composed mostly of steryl and triterpenyl esters. Sunflowerseed oil, at 0.7%, and soybean oil, at 0.3%, showed greater variety in that branched chain esters were included with the steryl/triterpenyl distributions.