Preliminary Purification and Distribution of Lipoxygenase in Grass Carp

The lipoxygenase (LOX) in grass carp can catalyze the oxidation of polyunsaturated fatty acids even their esters, resulting in rancidity deterioration of grass carp and its products during the process and storage. Preliminary purification, quantitative determination and distribution of grass carp muscular LOX were investigated in the present study. LOX activity of the grass carp muscle was measured to be 35.17 KU/g and its molecular weight was 95.71 kDa identified by SDS-PAGE. Using previously reported extraction methods such as twice salting-out and once dialysis, the LOX protein content in the crude muscular LOX extraction is about 28%. When salted with graded saturation of ammonium sulfate, we found once salting-out was enough for LOX extraction and the effective percentage saturation of ammonium sulfate for LOX extraction was 40%. Under this condition, the LOX protein content in the crude muscular LOX extract was doubled. The LOX distribution in fish was gradually increased from skin and muscle, gill, viscera to blood, which indicates that it is very important to remove the viscera and bleed fish completely during fish product processing to decrease the risk of lipid oxidation caused by LOX.