A Rapid Method To Determine Starch Damage In Sorghum

As a major component of cereal grains, including sorghum, starch plays an important role not only in grain development but also in post-harvest processing and end-product quality. Since milling can lead to the inadvertent disruption of starch granules, negatively affecting dough rheology, monitoring of starch damage is an important part of flour formulation. As the existing methods for quantifying starch damage are time-consuming, an alternative non-enzymatic methodology was sought. This study described the use of SDmatican instrument developed for determining starch damage in wheat flourfor assessment of sorghum flour via generation of a standard calibration. The known starch damage values were integrated to the SDmatic Ai%, and the starch damage was calculated using the following equation: Starch Damage = aAi%(2) + bAi% + c. The following variables were developed for calibrating sorghum starch damage: a = 0.168, b = -30.123, and c = 1349.648. Using this calibration developed specifically for sorghum flour increased our linear regression from initial R-2 = 0.38 to R-2 = 0.95.