Industrial Enzymes

 Everyone knows the positive effect that olive oil has on health. As interest in healthy nutrition increases, olive oil consumption increases worldwide.

Olives naturally contain small amounts of enzymes that soften the fruit during ripening. Also, its external addition helps to degrade the vegetable walls of the olive, thus releasing additional amounts of oil after mechanical treatment. Another significant effect of the enzymes is to destabilize the oil-water emulsion, which provides a greater, easier and faster separation of the two phases.

Over the centuries mindkind has produce alcohol drinks from different ingredients depending on the geographic origin they came from (whiskey, sake, etc.). No matter the raw materials used, starch is the basic ingredient common to all of them which must be fragmented so that yeast can turn it into alcohol. Two different  enzymes are used sequentially to achieve this, alpha-amylases for liquefaction and glucose amylases (amylo-glucosidases) used for saccharification.

Beer is made of four ingredients: water, malt, hop and yeast. However, very little is said about the enzymes found in malt and their essential role. Enzymes found in malt sometimes are not enough to do their job and need to be aided properly. For many years different industrial enzymes (beta-glucanases, proteases, fungal amylases, glucoamylases) and others have been used to complement the good job of the malt.

People with lactose intolerance are able to drink milk without problems because the milk has been previously treated with lactase enzyme which breaks down lactose. Another enzyme obtained from a fungus is currently used to clot cheese.This provides an excellent tool for cheese production and at the same time avoids having to slaughter young calves to get the coagulating enzyme from their stomachs as has traditionally been done.

Lactose intolerant people are able to drink milk without problems because the milk has been previously treated with the lactose enzyme which destroys the lactose. Another enzyme derived from a fungus is currently used to coagulate cheese preventing lambs from having to be unnecessarily slaughtered in order to obtain the coagulating enzyme from their stomachs, as it was done traditionally.

Cereal grains used to make different flours contain enzymes. However, the quality of these enzymes is not always sufficient for the bread-making process. So it is often necessary to complement those enzymes by adding external ones. Bakers have at their disposal a group of natural enzymes which help them to achieve excellent quality bread with fixed characteristics, through a balanced manufacturing process. Either increasing the volume of the dough (fungal amylase), eliminating its stickiness while kneading (pentosanases) or delaying the anti-staling effect of bread (special amylases) together with these enzymes bakers also have at their disposal other enzymes which allow them to achieve their main target, which is to provide their customers with excellent quality bread.

The enzymes are used in direct ingestion as tablets, either as a single component or forming more or less complex cocktails, composed of several enzymes that are used in sports nutrition, dietary and food supplements for people of different ages.

They also play an essential role in the digestion of animals. Therefore, properly adding enzymes to the feed may entail an expansion of the natural enzymatic system of the animal, making some of the feed components more digestible. Various enzymes can be combined to provide adequate feeding for broilers and piglets and to provide them with rapid growth.

In the pet sector, enzymes help improve the palatability and flavor of dog and cat food.

Protein hydrolysates fundamentally refers to those cases in which the protein substrate comes from animals and plants sources. The enzymatic treatment is performed for two main reasons: to modify the protein to increase its value or to extract the protein in a more effective manner. The enzymatic treatment  modifies the functional properties of the protein that are generally increased in a positive way, such as texture, foam stability solubility, whippability, flavour, viscosity, etc and allowing them to expand their area of use.

Enzymes in the textile world have been used  from more than a century as in Desizing. Cotton threads are protected with a starch sizing to prevent them from breaking while weaving; once this process is over alfa amylases are used to remove the  starch. Cellulases are also used in biopolissing  to eliminate in cotton those undesirable fuzzing balls from the fabrics surface. Washing of denim clothes allows to replace big quantities of pumice stone for small amounts of cellulases enzymes granting important advantages  such as: increasing the machine capacity, less machine wear, wide range of effects, better quality of the processed fabrics and also allowing a more environmentally friendly process. Another application is  washing  the fabrics  with catalases after the bleaching process , which completely remove  the hydrogen peroxide and it  prevents  any residue of peroxide  from interfering in the subsequent process of dying.