Investigation of dynamic and physicochemical properties of loaded- propolis extract nanoparticles

Propolis is rich in bioactive compounds, including antioxidant and antimicrobial compounds, therefore it is necessary to protect these sensitive compounds by high-performance methods such as encapsulation. The purpose of this research was to produce nanoparticles containing the propolis extract and to investigate its physicochemical characteristics. In this research, propolis was extracted with ethanol-water (70:30) solvents and protein nanoparticles containing it were prepared. Then, the dynamic light scattering characteristics, the encapsulation efficiency, the detection of crystalline and amorphous structure, and the interactions between the core and wall materials in nanoparticles were measured. To analyse the results, analysis of variance method was used, using SPSS software. The results of the dynamic test and encapsulation efficiency showed that with the increase in the amount of core and wall materials, the encapsulation efficiency, particle size and PDI increase. In the formulation with the same amounts of protein, with the increase in the concentration of propolis extract, the amount of negative charge of zeta potential also increased. The results of the XRD device showed that the treatments, 6 and 8, had the highest values of L and a, respectively. The graphs obtained from the FT-IR test showed that there were very minor changes in the form of peak displacement or symmetrical changes in the nanoparticles containing propolis extract compared to the control nanoparticles. This research showed that in the preparation of nanoparticles, the larger the amount of nuclear material, the larger the size of the resulting nanoparticles, the crystal intensity and the encapsulation efficiency.