Fatty acid content in bovine milk under the action of β-carotene

Abstract

One of the key issues in the production of high-quality, biologically complete milk is to provide cows with a sufficient amount of biologically active substances, including vitamin A and its precursor β-carotene. One of the ways to enrich milk with vitamin A and carotenoids is feeding cows with natural feed additives, including vitaton containing up to 10% trans-β-carotene, which can be converted into vitamin A, as well as exhibit antioxidant, immunostimulating, and anticarcinogenic effects in the body. Vitaton is the biomass of fungi Blakeslea trispora TKST strain, a product of microbial synthesis obtained by cultivating the producer on the waste of starch and molasses production. In terms of sanitation, the biomass of the fungi Bl. trispora is safe for animals, since the main condition for its production is sterility, excluding any microorganisms entering the fermentation medium. Besides, after the end of fermentation, the temperature of the medium is raised to 65–70 °C in the fermenter that destroys the β-carotene producer itself. We conducted research on cows of the Ukrainian black and white dairy breed, which were fed with vitaton, in conditions of “Kuibysheve” ALLC of the Poltava region. The introduction of vitaton into the cows’ diet contributes to the increase of the milk fat content by an average of 0.26% and enhances the phospholipid synthesis in the mammary gland by 1.8 times. Vitaton as a biologically active additive did not affect the ratio of total saturated to unsaturated fatty acids in bovine milk but stimulated the formation and inclusion of two unsaturated fatty acids into the milk fat, namely nonadecanoic and α-linolenic, against the background of the disappearance of the arachidonic acid peak in the chromatogram. Changes in the fatty acid composition of milk fat obtained from cows fed with the vitaton as a source of β-carotene indicate the effect of β-carotene and other biologically active components contained in vitaton on milk lipid synthesis.