John R. Whitaker - Böcker

Topics in these proceedings include: the manipulation of genes in plants in order to produce needed food-related compounds, novel vaccines and therapeutic reagents, better overall fruits and vegetables, improved nutritional quality, and prevention of problems affecting the quality of plant foods. General strategies are presented on how to efficiently approach the bioengineering of a plant for better properties by creating arsenals of various cloned genes for enzymes from plant, algae, fungal, and bacterial sources.

Discussing methods of enzyme purification, characterization, isolation, and identification, this book details the chemistry, behavior, and physicochemical properties of enzymes to control, enhance, or inhibit enzymatic activity for improved taste, texture, shelf-life, nutritional value, and process tolerance of foods and food products. The book covers general aspects of enzymology and the biotechnological strategies for enzyme discovery and development. It describes prototypic enzymes of the six chemical types of reactions catalyzed by enzymes, addressing what the enzymes do, their importance to feed and food production, their chemical and biological properties, and measurement of their activity.

This book describes a number of biological techniques that are of vital importance to the quality and safety assessment of foods, particularly in the areas of nutrition and food toxicology. It contains examples of the application of the principles in the analysis of compounds of interest in foods.

This second edition explains the fundamentals of enzymology and describes the role of enzymes in food, agricultural and health sciences. Among other topics, it provides new methods for protein determination and purification; examines the novel concept of hysteresis; and furnishes new information on proteases, oxidases, polyphenol oxidases, lipoxygenases and the enzymology of biotechnology.

Food and raw material for its production was generally produced via the traditional agriculture. On the other hand, novel chemicals were manufactured in the laboratory or extracted from plant and animal sources. However, as the world population is steadily in­ creasing, there is a decrease in traditional agriculture productivity and concerns are also expressed over the damage inflicted to the environment and restrictions that might be en­ forced in food production. At the same time, there is an increasing demand for high qual­ ity agricultural products as well as for food ingredients related to both the traditional or newly discovered nutrients or phytochemicals. Trends and developments,~n the area of plant biotechnology and bioengineering has allowed manipulation of genes' !lnd/or insertion of new genes, thus production of trans­ genic plants. Starting from the introduction of agronomic traits, particularly stress resis­ tance to diverse environmental factors, process and sensory characteristics, food quality and production of novel varieties of plant-based products through genetic engineering, biotechnology is changing the,;agriculture and the concept of production of plant-ba~~d raw materials. Increasing attention is being paid on research for production of plants !pat can provide a wide array of food and non-food products. Perhaps the first non-food pro,d­ uct that plant biotechnology would achieve is production of large scale custom-designed industrial oils, but the list of chemicals is long, ranging" from oils and specific triacyl­ glycerols to biopolymers, enzymes, blood components, amo~g others.