E-Book Overview
"Reviews specific enzymes and enzyme groups studied in recent years, delves into the relationship between enzymes and seafood quality, covers the application of enzymes as seafood processing aids, and focuses on the recovery of useful enzymes as by-products from seafood waste. Details the control of enzyme activity in seafood products."
E-Book Content
Preface It has been over 100 years since Eduard Büchner showed that molecules with catalytic activity could be isolated from yeast cells. Following decades of intensive research on these molecules (enzymes), we now know they are ubiquitous in living systems and are the agents that make chemical reactions possible in a diversity of life forms, albeit sometimes under vastly different environmental conditions. In 1961, when the International Commission on Enzymes of the International Union of Biochemistry established a system to classify enzymes, the committee listed only 712 enzymes. The total number of enzymes identified has since grown to more than 3000. Most of the known enzymes have been extensively studied in land mammals, such as rats, and microorganisms, such as Escherichia coli. So why devote a book to enzymes from aquatic animals? Although most of the enzymes discussed in this book are also found in terrestrial life forms, homologous enzymes from different sources, which have the same name and Enzyme Commission (EC) number, may exhibit vastly different properties with respect to stability, temperature optimum, secondary substrate specificity, and others. These differences are based on adaptation and are magnified when the cellular milieu of the source organisms varies because of habitat conditions or other reasons. Aquatic organisms occupy unique and often extreme environments, such as the deep ocean where pressure is high and light is absent; temperature ranges from –2ºC in Polar saline gradients to 103ºC at