Chemical composition of garden cress (Lepidium sativum) seeds and its fractions and use of bran as a functional ingredient.

Garden cress (Lepidium sativum) belonging to the family Cruciferae grown in India, Europe and US is an underutilized crop. The edible whole seed is known to have health promoting properties. Hence, it was assumed that these seeds can be a functional food. A preliminary work on chemical composition of seeds was carried out and the possibility of using it as nutraceutical food ingredient in dietary fiber formulation was explored. Three fractions namely whole meal (WM), endosperm and bran were analyzed for chemical composition. The yield of the endosperm and the bran fraction were 72 and 28%, respectively. The WM, endosperm and bran had 22.5, 27.7 and 12.6% protein, 27.5, 33.1 and 6% fat, 30, 13.6 and 75% dietary fibre (DF), and 1193.00, 945.15 and 1934.57 mg% potassium respectively. The major protein on SDS-PAGE was of 29.5 kDa. The most abundant amino acid was glutamic acid (19.3%) and the essential amino acid, leucine was the highest (8.21 +/- 0.01%) and methionine the lowest (0.97 +/- 0.02%). The major fatty acid was linolenic acid (30.2%) and low amount of erucic acid (3.9%) was also present. Bran having high water holding capacity and high DF, its use as source of DF was explored. The product contained 12% protein, 4% fat and 74.3% DF and exhibited desirable functional properties such as dispersibility, gelling ability, stability, formed homogenous mild alkaline suspension and was comparable to proprietary DF.