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Protein Thermal Stability Essay

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Proteins are a series of connected amino acids, and in food products, proteins provide both nutritional and functional properties that contribute to the quality of a food system (Christen and Smith 2000). Protein in the diet is essential to the maintenance of life and health. Proteins are compounds with a function that do work in the body such as facilitate reactions; however, proteins are also functional in food systems. Proteins are used for a variety of reasons such as: to create an emulsion, join pieces of meat together, form a skin on the surface of a product, and form a stable foam matrix. Milk proteins such as whey and casein are isolated for many different functions in food systems such as: foaming, whipping, gelation, …show more content…

There are multiple methodologies implemented by scientists to determine protein concentration. One of the oldest and most commonly used methods is the Biuret method (Okutucu and others 2007). The Biuret method is a colormetric assay that utilizes a spectrophotometric change accomplished by reactions containing peptide bonds in conjunction with copper (Okutucu and others 2007; Gornall and others 1949) to determine protein concentration based on a standard reference. Thermal stability of a protein is an important factor in food systems. Heat is commonly used to cook and/or sterilize a food product for a number of reasons. Heat is used in cooking to denature the proteins present in bacteria to destroy them; however, if certain food proteins are denatured, the food product could lose its functionality. Heating can also have beneficial effects on proteins such as flavor, tenderness and digestibility (Christen and Smith 2000).
Protein thermal stability is not fully understood and can be due to a host of factors such as internal folding, hydrogen bonding, electrostatic forces, and calcium affinity (Vogt and Argos 1997). There are many types of proteins that convey thermally stable properties such as malate dehydrogenase, lactate dehydrogenase, ferrodoxin, hydrolase, phosphofructokinase, and others (Vogt and Argos 1997). Argos and others (1997) explain that protein thermal stability is a result of the amino acid sequence and the

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