Natural template-mediated synthesis of high loading microcapsules for personal care products

Essential oils have attracted increasing attention for applications in various fields, especially pharmaceutical products, cosmetic products, and food preservative applications. Owing to their sensitivity to environment including light, temperature, and oxygen, they are easily deteriorated, leading to low quality and shelf life of the desired products. The protection or encapsulation into polymeric microcapsule is required. However, the microcapsules are mainly produced from synthetic polymers, which are non-degradable, leading to waste accumulation and contamination of the ecosystem. The development of natural microcapsules or plant-based microspores for encapsulation of bioactive ingredients is of interest. Then, this work aims to utilize the natural microcapsule of Lycopodium clavatum spores for encapsulation of black pepper essential oils (BEOs) and Sacha inchi oil using a facile passive loading technique. This work is divided into two main parts. Part one concerned the extraction of L. clavatum spore by chemical extraction and extraction of BEOs, including characterization of Sacha inchi oils. Chemical extraction was applied to remove the native biomolecules such as proteins and lipids from L. clavatum spore. Scanning electron micrographs and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy analysis have shown the spore with clean, intact, and microcapsule (hollow) structure. At the same time, BEOs were obtained from the extraction of Thai commercial black pepper (Piper nigrum) by using the hydro-distillation method. The major compounds of the extracted BEOs analyzed by Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) composed of caryophyllene (38.18%), D-limonene (33.5%), and followed by α-copaene (4.5%), and γ-elemene (2.6%). In parallel, commercial Sacha inchi oils compositions were characterization by GC-MS before used. Results showed that a high percentage of fatty acid such as linoleic (ω6:28.3%) and oleic acid (ω9: 10.68%), α-Tocopherol (1.08%), cholesta-3,5-diene (2.44%), γ-Tocopherol (9.39%), Tri-o-methyl-dopamine (1.88%), Stigmasterol (8.29%), γ-sitosterol (4.52%) was obtained. Part II involved utilization of extracted L. clavatum microcapsule spores for encapsulation of BEOs and Sacha inchi oil by using a facile passive loading technique. The different ratios of oil: spores were investigated. For encapsulation of BEOs, with the ratio of BEOs: spores at 1:1, high encapsulation efficiency (%EE) and loading capacity (%LC) of 50.64±4.92 and 29.26±3.70% were obtained. Moreover, perfect morphologies of BEOs-encapsulated microcapsule spores were still observed. For the encapsulation of Sacha inchi oils, the high %EE and %LC of 42.17% and 30.46% were obtained using the ratio of oil: spores at 0.75:1. The release behaviours of the Sacha inchi oil from the microcapsule under friction techniques showed that 96.43±1.14%. Moreover, the as-prepared microcapsule spores had the potential for antioxidant properties of 71.58±0.50% at 40 mg/ml.