Gellan Gum E418 is a polysaccharide produced by fermentation technology,this polysaccharide is widely used in the food industry in a wide variety of products. With increasing use of processed and simulated foods, greater efforts have been made to create unique textured food products because it forms transparent,strong and heat- or acid-resistant gels.
some foods with unique textures, such as jellies and gum-like candy,have attracted much attention and have been enormously popular, and so the development of food products should be aimed at achieving desirable physical structures and perceived eating quality.
The structural and textural properties of food materials are especially important factors when judging the quality of foods.Eating should not only be to satisfy our appetites but also to give pleasure, and we are exposed to a great range of foods and can make our choice depending on individual preference.
Gellan gum, an extracellular polysaccharide, is widely used in the food industry and in biotechnology because it forms a transparent gel with outstanding flavour release, is resistant to heat and its gel strength is less dependent on pH than many other polysaccharide gels.
Another interesting property of gellan gum is the good flavour/taste release capacity of gels, because the water structured within the gel is instantaneously released upon mastication. Soft food gels such as dessert jellies, formed by polysaccharides, very often contain sugar.
Gellan gum is widely used in Biotechnology too because it has novel functional properties.
Gellan gum can function at very low concentrations and can be adapted to many applications. Moreover,gellan gum can provide a wide range of gel textures by careful control of added salts, and so these gels give the same texture as other polysaccharide gels or create new textures.
The most striking characteristic of low acyl gellan gum is that it forms hard and transparent gels in the presence of metallic ions, such as Ca2+ .
It is well known that gellan gum exhibits a conformational change from the disordered state (single chain) to the ordered state (double helix) with decreasing temperature, and the gelation is considered to be mediated by the double-helix formation and the association of such helices which is enhanced by the presence of metallic cations].
The physical nature of the gel states is, of course, related to the structure of the gel network (crosslinking structure) and the chain properties between crosslinks.
The rheological and physicochemical properties of gellan gum in the sol state are also very interesting.
The solubility in an aqueous solution and the contamination of microgels were very much improved.
This polysaccharide is widely used in the food industry because it forms transparent and heat- or acid-resistant gels
