Jingyun Zho, Xiohn Guo, Ze Chen, Ylei Di, Hongshn Ling,Qinhun Deng, Shugng Li, Bin Zhou,*

    a Key Laboratory of Fermentation Engineering, Ministry of Education; National “111” Center for Cellular Regulation and Molecular Pharmaceutics;Hubei Key Laboratory of Industrial Microbiology; School of Biological Engineering and Food, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan 430068, China

    b College of Food Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China

    c Key Laboratory of Oilseeds processing, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Wuhan 430062, China

    Keywords:

    Salted duck egg white

    Desalination

    Protein nanogels

    Pickering emulsion

    Stability

    A B S T R A C T

    Achieving the reuse of traditional egg by-products, salted duck egg whites (SEW), is an urgent problem to be solved. In this current work, we constructed a heat-induced gel-assisted desalination method for SEW.Subsequently, a top-down way was utilized to prepare desalted duck egg protein nanogels (DEPN) with uniformly distributed diameters and their application in the oil/water (O/W) interface system was explored.The results revealed that the increase of DEPN concentration could lower the droplet size, however, the size was negatively correlated with the oil phase fraction. Moreover, the effect of pH, ionic strength, and temperature on the emulsion stability demonstrated that the DEPN-stabilized emulsion displayed superior physical stability under different conditions. The addition of NaCl resulted in the significant decrease in droplet size of the emulsion, while further increasing the NaCl concentration, the droplet size did not decrease accordingly. Besides, heat-treatment and cold-treatment had little negative effect on the stability of the emulsion. Even if the droplet size of the emulsion increased at 80 °C for 3 h, the morphology of the emulsion remained unchanged. Our study demonstrated DEPN had great potential as a stabilizer for food-grade Pickering emulsions. ......