γ-aminobutyric acid is a small molecular weight non-protein amino acid with high edible safety. It can be applied in food, beverage, medicine and other fields, but cannot be used in tea farmers such as baby food and meat products. It is widely added and used in coffee, tea, candy, baked food, puffed food, chocolate, cocoa products and other foods. Generally speaking, the intake of γ-aminobutyric acid should be controlled within 500mg/d.
There are many methods to obtain γ-aminobutyric acid, such as plant enrichment, chemical synthesis, microbial fermentation, etc. Different preparation methods have different advantages and disadvantages, such as chemical synthesis, raw materials are easy to obtain, but the reaction is not easy to control, and the cost is high; Plant enrichment method, low production cost, high purity; Microbial fermentation method has high requirements on environment and equipment, and it is difficult to achieve large-scale production due to the potential safety hazards in the preparation process. Therefore, plant enrichment method is more suitable for the preparation of γ-aminobutyric acid. Plant enrichment method have column preparation method and solvent extraction separation of two kinds, preparation method, also known as the column separation column chromatography, using different mixture composition of different distribution coefficient in the solid liquid two phase to elution separation and other operations, will often resin, activated carbon or silica as filler material of chromatographic column, However, solvent extraction mainly uses water or alcohol as extraction agent, and extracts γ-aminobutyric acid by relying on the difference in solubility and distribution coefficient of plants in water or alcohol. After repeated filtration and purification, most γ-aminobutyric acid in plants can be extracted.
