Mechanistic Model Development for a Multi-Enzyme Protein Hydrolysis Process

Abstract: New food products are constantly put on the market. Today the focus often lies in creating nutritional and sustainable products to reduce the environmental impact of the product in question. One example of this is the approval of the yellow mealworm, Tenebrio Molitor, as a novel food in the European union. To efficiently include the protein fraction of the yellow mealworm into food formulations, knowledge of the techno-functional properties of the protein is crucial. The techno-functional properties of the protein have further been demonstrated to be manipulable by partial enzymatic hydrolysis. This thesis aimed to develop a mechanistic mathematical model that describes the change in the molecular weight distribution of the protein due to multi-enzymatic hydrolysis. Which could later be used to tailor the techno- functional properties. The developed model showed good result in being able to capture the expected multi-enzyme systems behavior, but it was necessary to introduce empirical adjustment factors to calibrate the model adequately with literature data. Synthetic data was created to examine the potential of accurately estimating the model parameters and to examine the temperature and pH dependence of the system through response surface methodology. Estimation of the parameters with the synthetic data revealed that the optimization procedure is likely to be sensitive to converge in local minimums. Correlation matrices also revealed a high interdependence among the parameters, making the task of finding a unique optimal calibration difficult. The empirical model used in the response surface method showed potential to capture the expected temperature and pH dependencies of the model, if given correct estimations.