Abdolrasoul hejri - Dep artment of Pol ymer Engineering and Color Technology, A mirkabirUniversity of Tech nology, Tehran , Iran
Kam aladin Gharanjig - Department of Organic Colorants, Institute for Color Science and T echnology, T ehran, Iran
Alireza Khosravi - Dep artment of Pol ymer Engineering and Color Technology, A mirkabirUniversity of Tech nology, Tehran , Iran
Mohamma damin Hejazi - Depa rtment of Food Technology, Branch of Northwest and West Region Agricultural Biotechnology Re search Institut e of Iran, Tabriz, Iran

Beta carotene is one of the most important natural food colorants which isalso the major source of vitamin A for most of the peo ple in the world. Theref ore,it is using as afunctional material in foods [ ۱].The n anostructured lipid ca rriers (NLC) based on mixture of solid lipi ds with spa tially incompatible liquid lipidsare considered as theseco nd-generatio n lipid nanoparticles. These new c olloidal carriers combined the advantages and avoid the disadvanta ges of the other colloi dal carriers [۲].Applica tion of the lipid nano particles (S LN and NLC) as potential delivery systems for function al materials in food h ave been recently inve stigated by many researchers in order to take the advantages of these systems in foo d industry such as incre asing the bioavailability of functional food ingredients [۳ -۴]. Thus,t he aim of this study w as to prepare the NLC containing beta carotene and to investigate the effect of li quid lipid co ntent of lipid phase, lipid phase c oncentratio n, surfactant concentra tion and te mperature on the particle size of d rug loaded NLC. Additionally, a mathematic al model w as developed to predict the particl e size of NLC.

Beta c arotene, Nanostructure d lipid carriers, Particle size, Mathe matical model.