Biocatalyzer preparation with hydrocolloids used in food industry

MAMMARELLA, ENRIQUE J; CASTELAO, ENRIQUE L.; CARRARA, CARLOS R; RUBIOLO, AMELIA C

Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Congreso; 5th. Latin American and 3rd. Ibero American Polymer Symposium; 1996

Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata

The developments in biotechnology are applied in the food industries that use enzymes because of the immobi­lization allows to obtain a better processing system. The enzyme immobilization is useful when high activity and stability of the enzyme in the carrier are reached by simple methods. Moreover, the biocatalyzer production must be economical, versatile, reproducible, and easily implemented. These aspects with the chemical nature and kinetics of the catalyzed reaction, physical and chemical stability of reactants, cost and purity of the desired product, and other important factors are taking into account in the final selection of the procedure. Considering that in food processing, catalyzed reac­tions are produced by enzyme in a medium with possibil­ity of microbial contamination which involve substrates and products of small sizes mixed with other macromole­cules, the entrapment method is appropriate (Bales, 1994). In this technique, the enzyme is entrapped in gels, micro-capsules, fibers, films or membranes. Sodium alginate and k-carrageenan, two polysaccharides present in seaweed, are substances very usually employed in matrix preparations due to the facility to form gels in presence of cations (Anon.,1988) and the possibility to be used in the foods since they are accepted as additive by the Food and Drug Administration regulations. However, the disadvantage of these compounds are their mechani­cal property variations which are modified with the gel structure obtained (Glicksman, 1983). The combination of this hydrocolloids allows to incorporate different cations in the biocatalyzer produc­ing different effects on the enzymes. In general, the Ca++, necessary to form the alginate matrix, is an enzyme inhibitor, while the K+ (Becker and Evans,1969) that produces the carrageenan gel structure, is an enzyme activator which reduces the negative action of Ca++ (Mammarella et al., 1991). The propose of this work was to study the size evolu­tion and the carrier strength with different concentrations of hydrocolloid solutions employed to obtain biocatalyzer beads. Through a statistic technique (Box and Wilson, 1951), the effects of each compound and the combinations of these substances to use in a carrier were determined.A biocatalyzer matrix with appropriate mechanical properties during a reasonable work period for the food industry was defined.