Food enzymes: the "chips" of the food manufacturing industry

As the "chips" of the food manufacturing industry, food enzymes can make food become increasingly better. They are of great significance to helping upgrade China's food industry and achieving high-quality development of the food industry. However, currently, there are relatively few varieties and production scales of food enzyme products in China, and the structure is unreasonable. The product quality cannot fully meet the actual application needs. High-activity, high-quality composite enzymes will become one of the development directions of food enzymes.

In this issue of Zhongshi Intellectual Property Expert Database, we are pleased to invite Professor Lu Fuping, a member of the Zhongshi Intellectual Property Expert Database and the Vice President of Tianjin University of Science and Technology, to write an unsigned article on the topic of "Food Enzymes: The 'Chips' of Food Manufacturing Industry" and share his unique views.

Food Enzymes: The "Chips" of the Food Manufacturing Industry

Food enzymes are widely found in animals, plants, and microorganisms and can be obtained through extraction or fermentation. These enzymes, like magic, create food with specific colors, shapes, tastes, and improve the function and quality of food. In various food processing methods, biocatalytic enzyme reactions have been widely used in food processing due to their mild conditions, high efficiency, specificity, energy conservation, environmental friendliness, and other characteristics. They work like "chips" in food processing and have strong functions that can meet the diverse needs of people for healthy food while also having a downstream market multiplication effect of tens or even hundreds of times. They drive the green development of China's food industry. Therefore, food enzymes, as the "chips" of the food manufacturing industry, can make food better and are of great significance in helping China's food industry upgrade and achieve high-quality development.

Food enzymes are intermediate catalytic media, and the products sold in the market are often their final products. People are often unfamiliar with food enzymes, but in fact, they have quietly entered into people's lives and played an important role. For example, coagulase used for making cheese and yogurt, papain that increases meat tenderness, xylanase that improves bread, protease for preparing functional polypeptides, and nattokinase in natto that can dissolve blood clots and lower blood viscosity.

The application of food enzymes mainly involves starch products manufacturing, dairy products manufacturing, baking foods manufacturing, seasoning manufacturing, fermentation products manufacturing, food additives manufacturing, wine and beverages manufacturing and other fields. Internationally, the most widely used food enzymes are in the starch and dairy products industries. However, the scale of food enzyme application in China is relatively small, mainly concentrated in the starch and brewing industries, while other food industries are still in their initial stages. Currently, food enzymes play an increasingly important role in improving the quality characteristics of foods such as structure characteristics; increasing food flavor and nutritional value; stabilizing effective components and food systems; reducing food safety risks; simplifying processing technology; etc.

With the improvement of people's requirements for healthy foods with nutrition and safety, food enzymes are also facing higher challenges. Currently, China has relatively few varieties and small production scales of food enzyme products with unreasonable structures. The quality of products cannot fully meet actual application needs. High-activity and high-quality composite enzymes will become one of the development directions for food enzymes. Different from the catalysis of single-component enzymes, there are various types of food raw materials with complex compositions. This poses higher requirements for catalytic capacity, catalytic conditions, and enzyme tolerance during enzyme application. To solve the contradiction between diverse food requirements and low refinement degrees of food enzymes, developing "tailor-made enzymes" that are targeted for different food raw materials and nutritional needs will also become a main development direction for food enzymes. In addition, unlike other food additives, food enzymes have more targeted applications in modifying foods. In the future, food enzymes will gradually break through traditional applications and further improve foods' physical and mechanical properties such as taste and texture through enzyme-enhanced improvement to promote the development of China's health industry.　

Food Enzyme Research Trends towards Intelligence and Efficiency

Commonly used food enzymes can be divided into glycosidases, proteases, lipases, oxidoreductases, and isomerases. Currently, the structure of food enzymes is mainly analyzed using protein crystallography supplemented by nuclear magnetic resonance, laying a theoretical foundation for the functional modification of food enzymes. Especially, in recent years, with the development of computational hardware and software, molecular simulation (such as homology modeling, molecular docking, molecular dynamics simulation, and quantum mechanical calculations) and artificial intelligence technologies have played a varying role in food enzyme research and development, mainly including catalytic mechanism analysis, efficient enzyme molecular rational design, and new enzyme mining.

Molecular simulation technology can visually observe the three-dimensional structure of food enzyme molecules, thereby deepening the understanding of the catalytic mechanism of food enzymes and guiding the rational design of food enzyme molecules. For example, to improve reaction rates, industrial production often requires food enzymes to have heat-resistant properties. Using computer simulation and big data analysis to identify the active site of food enzymes and the key amino acid residues that affect enzyme thermostability, and further rational design of these amino acid residues can obtain heat-resistant enzyme molecules. In addition, new types of enzyme molecules that are resistant to alkaline, acidic conditions, and have improved catalytic efficiency can also be obtained. In addition to modifying existing food enzymes, in recent years, with the exponential growth of biological databases, computational simulation technology has also become competitive in screening and mining novel food enzyme molecules.

In addition, synthetic biology, high-throughput screening, and efficient gene editing have made the improvement of food enzyme properties more precise and faster. Synthetic biology focuses on design-build-test-learning and provides a new development direction for the design and development of highly active food enzymes. The structure of various food enzymes is becoming more transparent, and their interaction with substrates is becoming clearer, providing a guarantee for obtaining new mutants that are more stable and efficient in adapting to complex application environments. With the popularization of flow cytometry instruments and liquid droplet microfluidic devices, as well as the development of high-throughput screening technologies such as fluorescence product replacement and fluorescent protein fusion expression for food enzymes, the efficiency of screening for special food enzymes has been further improved. In addition, with the development of high-efficiency gene editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 in food enzyme expression hosts, the adaptability of food enzyme expression systems to reconstructed hosts has been continuously improved, and enzyme expression efficiency has achieved new breakthroughs.