Patauá vegetable oil is rich in fatty acids that are beneficial to health, as well as antioxidant
and antibacterial properties, making it an attractive food-grade component. However, its
chemical structure makes it unfeasible to use in food formulations, which makes it relevant to
use nanoemulsions to overcome this challenge, promoting interaction and enabling better
delivery mechanisms for bioactives and nutrients. The main objective of this work was to
obtain and evaluate the antibacterial activity of patauá oil nanoemulsions. The oil was
evaluated for its physicochemical properties and functional indices including iodine index,
saponification, density, oxidative capacity, atherogenicity (AI), thrombogenicity (IT) and
hypocholesterolemic/hypercholesterolemic ratio (H/H), followed by the composition of the
lipid profile by GC-MS and the nanoemulsions, prepared by the low energy method, were
characterized for size, PDI and zeta potential values. Finally, both samples were evaluated for
their bacterial activity using nine strains standardized by the well diffusion method. Patauá
oil showed iodine, saponification, density and oxidative capacity values of 64.84, 200.7,
0.912, 0.992, respectively, while its functionalities showed 0.25 for AI, 0.78 for IT and 3.93
for H/H. The lipid profile showed a majority of unsaturated fatty acids such as oleic acid and
triglycerides such as triolein. The nanoemulsions had a size of 54.68 and 102.4 nm, a PDI of
0.191 and 0.215, and a zeta potential of -8.91 and -14.3. In terms of antibacterial activity, both
the patauá oil and the surfactant did not show an inhibitory zone in any of the wells; however,
both nanoemulsions showed activity against three gram-negative bacteria such as Aeromonas
hydrophyla, Proteus vulgaris and Pseudomonas aeroginosa, and one gram-positive bacteria
such as Streptococcus equi. The other bacteria analyzed did not show inhibition values in any
of the samples. In short, patauá oil proved to be an excellent component for application in
food-grade products due to its nutritional and bioactive potential, as well as a source of
bacterial inhibition.
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