Understanding the multi-scale structural changes in starch and its physicochemical properties during the processing of chickpea, navy bean, and yellow field pea seeds.

This study aimed to isolate starch from three types of untreated and autoclaved pulse seeds including chickpea, navy bean, and yellow field pea and to characterize their multi-scale structure and the associated physicochemical properties. Autoclaving of pulse seeds tended to significantly decrease the relative crystallinity, the M value, and degree of order of starch samples measured by X-ray diffraction, size exclusion chromatography, and FT-IR. Simultaneously, double helix content, and degree of double helix obtained from solid-state CNMR and FT-IR were relatively higher (P < 0.05) for autoclaved pulse seeds than their native counterparts. The structural characteristics also corroborated well with the obtained results of resistant starch content, gelatinization behavior, swelling power, solubility, and bile acid binding capacity. This research gave insights into the structural characteristics of starch from pulses and their changes that occurred following processing of seeds, aiming to provide information for the future study on their processing-structure-function relationship.