Developing valuable egg components for niche market applications

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In Canada, about 30% of the total eggs are broken and further incorporated into various food applications; themajority are sold as table eggs. Traditional food uses as above have reached its bottleneck and failed to furtherenhance the profitability of the egg industry. Diversification of egg uses, other than traditional food uses, wouldhelp them expand into value-added niche markets, which are not typically reached by table eggs. The eggindustry envisions that diversification of egg uses is critical to the viability and growth of the Canadian eggindustry. In the application, we aim to develop functional bioactive peptides from egg white and thenfractionate valuable egg yolk components for functional food, nutraceutical, nutritional, aquaculture, cosmeticand pharmaceutical industries. Our previous study has demonstrated the potential of egg ovotransferrinpeptides against hypertension. This study is to further demonstrate additional beneficial properties of eggpeptides against metabolic syndrome to expand their new applications. Since it is costly to purifyovotransferrin from egg white, further study is to use egg white protein, other than ovotransferrin, as thestarting material for preparing bioactive peptides. The remaining egg yolk, after egg white peptide preparation,will be fractionated into egg yolk lipids (i.e. neutral lipids, cholesterol and phospholipids) and egg yolk proteins(plasma and granule proteins) for nutritional, aquaculture, cosmetic, nutraceutical, and pharmaceuticalapplications.Canada has a well-respected egg industry yet there is limited commercial activity for value-added egg products.Developing value added egg products will provide the Canadian egg industry with new ways of marketing newvalue-added egg products; by fractionating egg yolk components and selling these valuable egg componentsseparately, the overall egg market could grow substantially. This would also foster knowledge-basedsustainable long-term growth of the egg industry, benefitting Canadian agri-food sectors.