Optimization of tyrosinase inhibition activity of ultrasonic-extracted polysaccharides from longan fruit pericarp

Various ultrasonic conditions were employed to prepare polysaccharides from longan fruit pericarp (PLFP) and the Lineweaver–Burk equation was then used to determine the effect of PLFP on inhibition of tyrosinase activity. This result showed that PLFP acted as a non-competitive inhibitor of tyrosinase. The highest slope was observed for ultrasonic extraction, followed by the hot-water extraction, suggesting that the ultrasonic treatment of PLFP increased the inhibition of tyrosinase activity. Furthermore, a multilayer feed-forward neural network trained with an error back-propagation algorithm was used to evaluate the effects of ultrasonic power, time and temperature on the slope value. The trained network gave a regression coefficient (R2) of 0.98 and a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.58, implying a good agreement between the predicted value and the actual value of the slope, and confirmed a good generalization of the network. Based on the artificial neural network-genetic algorithm, the optimal ultrasonic extraction conditions to obtain the highest slope value (154.1) were determined to be 120 W, 12 min and 57 °C. Application of response surface plots showed the slope value as a function of every two factors under various ultrasonic extraction conditions, which can be observed directly. Therefore, the artificial neural network provided a model with high performance and indicated the non-linear nature of the relation between ultrasonic conditions and slope value.