Simplified Enzymatic Upgrading of High-Acid Rice Bran Oil Using Ethanol as a Novel Acyl Acceptor.

One of the major challenges in the upgrading of high-acid rice bran oil (RBO) is to efficiently reduce the amount of free fatty acids. Here we report a novel method for upgrading high-acid RBO using ethanol as a novel acyl acceptor in combination with a highly selective lipase from Malassezia globosa (SMG1-F278N). This process enabled an unprecedented deacidification efficiency of up to 99.80% in a short time (6 h); the immobilized SMG1-F278N used in deacidification exhibited excellent operational stability and could be used for at least 10 consecutive batches without detectable loss in activity. Scale-up was performed under optimized conditions to verify the applicability of this process, and low-acid (0.08%) RBO with a high level of γ-oryzanol (27.8 g/kg) and γ-oryzanol accumulation fold (1.5) was obtained after molecular distillation at lower temperature (120 °C). Overall, we report a simplified and efficient procedure for the production of edible RBO from high-acid RBO.