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Germination was used as a tool to produce new, healthy and tasty food ingredients from oats.With the developed short germination programme combined with heat treatment the stability of oats during storage was improved and the amount of bioactive compounds was increased.However, the content and molecular weight of oat b-glucans was only slightly influenced.The improvement in storage stability was seen as a slower formation of lipid originated aldehydes and retarded develoment of rancid flavors in germinated oats during storage. Antioxidativity, sterol content and the content of oat specific phenolic compounds, avenantramides, were increased significantly during germination. Some increase was also seen in vitamin content.The increase in bioactive compounds was especially seen in the studied naked cultivar Lisbeth.

This paper describes a novel and feasible fractionation method to increase the amount of β-glucan in oat bran. Special attention has also been paid to the recovery of other oat fractions: protein, starch and lipids. We evaluated how the defatting of oat by supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) affects the behaviour of oats in different dry fractionation processes by conducting both pilot and industrial scale defatting with subsequent milling and air classification trials. In addition, we followed the distribution of different grain components in each fraction. Lipid removal enabled an effective separation of bran, starch and protein particles, and the β-glucan concentration in the bran fraction could be increased to 35%. The product had low lipid content, and thus a prolonged shelf life. The fractionation process was optimised in terms of the yield of bran fraction and its β-glucan concentration. The cost-effective production of high purity β-glucan concentrates, obtained according to this study, would enable feasible manufacture of new types of oat based functional food products.