Milk is nature’s most complete food. While milk clearly provides basic nutritional requirements, bioactive components within milk also impart a wide range of additional health benefits to both the neonate and the adult. However, human milk is compositionally different from cow’s milk, and certain protein components of cow’s milk can act as allergens to susceptible humans. One way of extracting the benefits of cow’s milk proteins, while eliminating the risk of allergenicity in humans, is to hydrolyse the milk proteins. Hydrolysis of milk proteins generates smaller peptide sequences from their parent protein that can be biologically active when released. At an industrial scale, hydrolysis of milk proteins can be achieved through either enzymatic hydrolysis or fermentation. An alternative process of generating similar sized peptides is by in silico synthesis. These compounds can subsequently be developed as fortifying food agents.
Part of the book: Milk Proteins