Substantial Improvement of Tryptic and Chymotryptic Hydrolysis of β-Lactoglobulin Pretreated with High Voltage Electrical Treatments

β-lactoglobulin (β-lg) is an important source of biologically and functionally active peptides that are of particular interest in agri-food, nutraceutical, and pharmaceutical industries. Enzymatic hydrolysis of proteins remains the most common mode of peptide production. However, efficient hydrolysis of proteins and particularly β-lg is difficult to perform due to their compact globular structure. Thus, the current study deals with green high-voltage electric treatments (HVET): pulsed electric fields and electric arc to pretreat β-lg and improve its proteolysis by trypsin and chymotrypsin. The results demonstrate substantial improvement of hydrolysis performance after the pretreatment of β-lg with HVET compared to the non-pretreated and preheated β-lg. Moreover, HVET led to the peptide release from β-lg even before the addition of proteases. Furthermore, pioneer studies of proteolysis kinetics and structural changes of β-lg molecules subjected to HVET allowed a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying hydrolysis improvement.