Concentrated food systems for sustainable membrane-based fractionation processes

对工业食品加工的可持续性和环境影响的日益关注，反对创造高价值食品成分的新挑战，同时使用更少的非可再生能源，更少的饮用水，并将产品损失和浪费降至最低。以牛奶为基础的蛋白质成分已经商业化几十年了，工业规模制备大部分纯化形式的单个牛奶蛋白质的技术选择是可用的。然而，所有这些方法目前都需要使用一些化学品，但最重要的是，它们依赖于大量的水进行稀释和/或透析过滤，以达到所需的蛋白质纯度。如今，越来越多的乳制品加工商通过反渗透(RO)对乳制品进行预浓缩，以降低运输成本并减少下游加工所涉及的体积。虽然预浓缩减少了对整体环境的影响，但浓缩食品系统的物理化学和功能特性在很大程度上被改变了。*我们研究计划的长期目标是了解和利用浓缩系统的特定物理化学特性，为复杂蛋白质混合物的分级开发新的加工方法。我们的假设是，膜分离可以用来设计浓缩液，在浓缩液中可以增强/控制不同的现象，如溶解度变化、蛋白质聚集、脂-蛋白质相互作用和盐沉淀，并用作分离助剂来改进分离过程。*1)表征高浓度体系中蛋白质的溶解性、聚集性和蛋白质-蛋白质相互作用等物理化学性质的变化。*2)确定促进蛋白质失稳或某些乳清成分聚合并使其能够分离的物理化学条件；*3)识别浓缩-透析过滤和透滤模式的组合，以优化纯化；*4)将为乳清蛋白开发的策略应用于酪蛋白浓缩物，以分离单个酪蛋白。*我们的研究计划将产生改进乳制品成分制造的可持续替代方案。通过将基础研究和应用研究相结合，该计划将为高素质的人员提供独特的培训机会，他们将受益于STELA乳业研究中心独特的研究环境和与乳制品行业的联系。

The growing concern about sustainability and environmental impact of industrial food processing opposes new challenges to create high-value food ingredients while using less non-renewable energy, less drinking water, and also, minimizing products losses & waste. Milk-based protein ingredients have been commercialized for decades and technological options to prepare most of individual milk protein in purified form at industrial scale are available. However, all of these approaches are currently requiring the use of some chemicals, but most importantly, they rely on large amounts of water for dilution and/or diafiltration in order to reach the desired degree of protein purity. Nowadays, dairy processors are increasingly pre-concentrating dairy fluids by reverse osmosis (RO) to decrease transportation costs and reduce the volumes involved in downstream processing. While pre-concentration decreases the overall environmental impact, physicochemical and functional properties of concentrated food systems are largely modified.****The long-term goal of our research program aims at understanding and using specific physicochemical characteristics of concentrated systems to develop new processing approaches for the fractionation of complex protein mixtures. It is our hypothesis that membrane separation can be used to design concentrates in which different phenomena such as solubility changes, protein aggregation, lipid-protein interactions and salts precipitation can be enhanced/controlled and used as separation aid to improve fractionation processes.****1) To characterize the changes in physicochemical properties such as protein solubility, aggregation and protein-protein interaction in highly-concentrated systems.****2) To identify the physicochemical conditions that enhance protein destabilization or polymerization of some of whey components and enables their separation;****3) To identify combinations of concentration-diafiltration and diafiltration modes to optimize purification;****4) Apply the strategy developed for whey proteins to casein concentrates for the separation of individual caseins.****Sustainable alternatives for improving the manufacture of dairy-based ingredients will be generated by our research program. By combining fundamental and applied research, this program will provide unique training opportunities for highly-qualified personnel who will benefit from a unique research environment at STELA Dairy research Center and contacts with the dairy industry.******