High Voltage Electrical Treatments To Improve the Protein Susceptibility to Enzymatic Hydrolysis

The rapidly growing global population raises important issues associated with the environmental burden imposed by agri-food and biotechnological industries to satisfy the increasing demand of high-quality food and nutraceuticals. Hence, the introduction of emergent ecoefficient technologies in the bioproduction lines is inevitable. The present study deals with environmentally sustainable high voltage electrical treatments (HVETs)—pulsed electric field (PEF) and electrical arc—to improve the susceptibility of β-lactoglobulin to enzymatic hydrolysis. This protein was chosen due to its high excess in dairy industry coproducts, which must be valorized. The results demonstrate that, at the optimal HVET duration of 10 min (voltage = 40 kV and pulse frequency = 0.5 Hz), the degree of hydrolysis can be improved by 80% and 66% for the PEF and electrical arc, respectively. This fact is related to the ability of HVET to induce the active sites formation in protein molecule for the nucleophilic enzymatic action, which leads to the release of bioactive and functionally active peptides. Moreover, it is possible to control the selectivity of hydrolysis by varying the HVET modes. Thus, the implication of HVET to valorize the dairy whey proteins by their enzymatic hydrolysis can significantly improve the process ecoefficiency.