3.3. Determination of Fatty Acids Content
Fatty acid content including total saturated fatty acids (SFA), monounsaturated fatty acid (MUFA) and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) was shown in Table 2. An example of the fatty acids chromatogram is presented in Figure 1.
When the fatty acid contents of the oils obtained by cold pressing method from pine nuts are examined, it was determined that it is rich in unsaturated fatty acids (86.16%) and the total saturated fatty acid content (10.7%) is much lower.
Linoleic acid (46.39%) was found to be the predominant fatty acid followed by palmitic (6.3%), stearic (3.5%), gadoleic (0.81%), linolenic (0.58%), eicosadienoic (0.49%), oleic (37.73%), behenic (0.13%), palmitoleic (0.1%), margaric (0.08%), myristic (0.06%) and heptadecenoic acid (0.05%).
In our study, 13 kinds of fatty acid were detected which is higher than that found in most studies in the literature. Colic et al., 2017 identified 16 kinds of fatty acids in 23 almond genotypes from Serbia [20]. Wang et al., 2019 detected 10 kinds of fatty acids in kernel oil from five wild almond species in China [21]. Nergiz et al., 2004 and Vanhanen et al., 2017 found that 12 kinds of fatty acids were present in different Pinus species [23, 24]. Meshgi et al., 2019 conducted a study to investigate the fatty acid composition in different pine species and they determined 5 kinds of fatty acids in different samples [25]. Lixia et al., 2018 detected 9 kinds of fatty acids in Pinus koraiensis L. nut oils [22].
The most abundant fatty acids were linoleic, oleic, palmitic and stearic acid in this research. This result is very consistent with other studies in the literature. The studies performed by Vanhanen et al., 2017 and Sen et al., 2016 showed that the major fatty acids present in some pine nut samples are linoleic, oleic, palmitic and stearic acid, respectively [24, 26]. In another study, palmitic and stearic acid were found to be the dominant saturated fatty acids [22]. Some studies showed that linoleic and oleic acid were found to be the dominant unsaturated fatty acids in some pine nut oils [21, 22]. Nasri et al., determined that linoleic acid is the major fatty acid followed by oleic, palmitic and stearic acids in the kernels of Pinus pinea L. [27].