ABSTRACT
Enzymes are biological catalysts capable of speeding up chemical reactions and are biological tools for improving food quality or food processing operations. Use of an enzyme as a processing aid has a number of advantages over use of chemicals, including high specificity, efficiency of catalysis at moderate temper atures, and being environmentally friendly. Among the enzymes used in food processing, hydrolases consist of the largest proportion (1). Overall, hydrolases dominate the global industrial enzyme sales, accounting for 97% of the total. Within the hydrolase class, proteases make up 24.0% of the market as the second largest group following carbohydrases. Most proteases are used in the food in dustry for a variety of products including baked foods, beer, wine, cereal, milk, and dairy products including cheese, chocolate, eggs and egg products, meat and fish products, legumes, and for production of protein hydrolysates and flavor ex tract (2). Among the potential applications, however, the enzymes recovered from fish have been most successfully used as seafood processing aids. Exam ples of such applications include accelerating fermentation of fish sauce or fer mented matjes herring. For details on such applications the reader is referred to Chapters 21 and 22. Although most industrial enzymes for the food industry are derived from animal by-products, plants, and microbial sources, enzymes from aquatic microorganisms are likely to establish a significant part of the industrial enzyme market, in the future, due to their unique characteristics (3).
