Biorefinery of insects to high-added value products: Evaluation of fractionation

Recently there has been increased interest in the use of insects for food and feed. This is not only because of the high protein content in insect biomass, as also the lipid frac-tion has value. Chitin, a third major compound in insects (present in the exoskeletons), can be beneficial for feed/food in very low concentrations but affects the digestibility and the utilization of its macro and micro-nutrients in the present concentration. The chitin removal of bee extract for example increased digestibility of the proteins from 71 to 94%. Hence there is a need for separation technologies. The extracted chitin, protein and fat fractions can further be processed for various applications besides food or feed. This poster presents a biorefinery for fractionating insect biomass focusing on preserv-ing the functional properties of proteins. In this way, proteins do not only have nutritional value but can serve as functional ingredient. More specifically, an approach has been elaborated to fractionate larvae of the black soldier fly into chitin, lipids and protein frac-tions envisioning maximal valorization of the biomass for application in feed and chem-istry. These larvae are well-known waste degrading insects, able to grow on different agro-industrial side streams and are on the list of the most promising insects for indus-trial production in the western world. Through the fractionation procedures high-value products like proteins, chitin and lipids can be recovered and thus turning waste into a second-generation resource. Separating fat from animal residue is traditionally performed by rendering, a high tem-perature process resulting in denatured proteins. Our new fractionation procedures will be compared to the rendering process focusing on yield, purity and especially on pre-serving the functional properties of proteins. Furthermore, we will discuss different pre-treatment and separation techniques to remove chitin. Results show that pretreatment as well as the solvent type has a major impact on the fractionation efficiency. This pro-ject has partially received funding from BBI Joint Undertaking under the European Un-ion’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 720715.