Cold Active Pectinases: Advancing the Food Industry to the Next Generation

Abstract

Pectinase has been an integral part of commercial food processing, where it is used for degradation of pectin and facilitates different processing steps such as liquefaction, clarification and juice extraction. The industry currently uses pectinases from mesophilic or thermophilic microorganisms which are well established, but recently, there has been is a new trend in the food industry to adopt low-temperature processing. This trend is due to the potential economic and environmental advantages which the industry envisages. In order to achieve this change, an alternative for the existing pectinases, which are mostly mesophilic and temperature-dependent, must be identified, which can function efficiently at low temperatures. Psychrophilic pectinases derived from cold-adapted microorganisms, are known to function at low to freezing temperatures and may be an alternative to address the problem. Psychrophilic pectinases can be obtained from the vast microflora inhabiting various cold regions on earth such as oceans, Polar Regions, snow-covered mountains, and glaciers. This article is intended to study the advantages of cold active pectinases, its sources, and the current state of the research.

Cold and Hot Extremozymes: Industrial Relevance and Current Trends

“…Pectinases are an integral part of the food industry. These enzymes catalyze the degradation of the plant carbohydrate pectin and are used in several food-related applications, like fruit juice processing for clarification and viscosity reductions and vinification and extraction of natural oils (Adapa et al, 2014 ). Today, most commercially available pectinases are derived from mesophilic organisms, but the current trend toward processing foods under low-temperature conditions is opening doors for the development of new cold-adapted pectinases.…”

Highly cold-active pectinases under wine-like conditions from non-Saccharomyces yeasts for enzymatic production during winemaking

“…Winemaking process is rather convenient to carry out at low temperature as it favours conservation of sensory characteristics of the end product (Adapa et al 2014). Accordingly, oenological enzymes able to be active at low temperature are needed.…”

Molecular insights into cold active polygalacturonase enzyme for its potential application in food processing

“…Cold active enzymes show very high catalytic activity at low or moderate temperatures and are thermolabile. Psychrozymes have increased flexibility that leads to extreme catalytic activity whereas mesophiles and thermophiles contain rigid protein structures to withstand high temperatures (Hochachka and Somero 1984;Somero 2004;Methe et al 2005;Adapa et al 2014;Pulicherla et al 2011;Rekha et al 2013). Other most significant and general feature of cold active microorganisms is the modifications in Fig.…”

“…The details of organisms, their accession numbers and the details about the length of amino acids were specified (Table 1). The selected sources were having mixture of mesophiles, thermophiles and psychrophiles and chosen based on their potentiality in major applications at industrial level as provided in the literature (Adapa et al 2014). ClustalW result clearly shows that most of the amino acids are highly conserved and some of the significant aminoacids are found to be involved in the formation of the active site (Fig.…”

“…But in food processing industries, functioning of enzymes at low temperatures is always preferred (20°C or below) due to certain economic and environmental advantages, such as, energy saving, retention of labile and volatile flavor compounds, prevention of contamination and elimination of any Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13197-014-1654-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. residual enzyme activity, which is inactivation of enzyme when temperature is raised (Adapa et al 2014). The unique features like high specific activity even at low temperatures and their property of rapid inactivation at moderate to higher temperatures make the psychrophilic genetic resources offer numerous economic and ecological advantages.…”