Objective
One of the most significant problems with regard to economics and environmental impact faced by the dairy industries is the disposal of lactose in whey and whey permeates. Lactose is a low value sugar accounting for up to 75% of the total dry material in whey and accumulates in annual quantities of approximately 1.2 million tons worldwide without many profitable routes for its direct utilisation being available. Lactose itself has a very weak marketing potential due to several reasons with lactose intolerance of the consumers being probably the most important. As a consequence there is a clear need for research to develop uses for lactose including conversion processes to more valuable products than the parent compound. These processes in turn could serve as the basis for new industries and will improve the EU competitiveness in the versatile area of lactose-derived products. The present project is a highly multidisciplinary approach to enzymatic lactose conversion processes with definite industrial potential and therefore calls for a consortium of European dimension. The project will focus on three major objectives. First, the project is aimed at improving existing chemical or biotechnological routes to lactose-derived products in terms of productivities and process economy. Integrated activities with regard to new biocatalyst including the tailoring of enzyme properties by protein engineering and the optimization of the corresponding reaction engineering employing high-productive combination processes of enzyme catalysis and membrane technology will lead to technical applications with a high degree of probability. Lactose hydrolysis to yield a mixture of glucose and galactose, which is more suitable for food applications than lactose, and classic primary conversions of lactose will be targeted. The products of the latter are lactitol, a low cariogenic sweetener, lactobionic acid, a compound known useful in medicine but also in food products due to its sweetsour taste, and lactulose, a bifidogenic component. The enzymatic approach to these products is characterized by two aspects of novelty: the use of coenzyme dependent biocatalysts for redox processes of lactose conversion and the emerging unit operation of charged nanofiltration membrane technology concerning coenzyme retention .
Tasks within the process development will include the preparation of suitable enzymes in sufficient quantities, optimization of discontinuous reactions and transfer to continuous mode of operation upstream processing of lactose with regard to a required substrate quality, and downstream processing of products mainly by membrane techniques. A second major goal of the project is to prepare new products from lactose while exploiting the entire range of synthetic potential of the
biocatalysts such as activity or specificity-tuned glycosidases, esterases and others. Employing the respective enzymes under non natural conditions like in organic solvents, a number of interesting compounds such as polymers oligosaccharides or glycosides will be made. The novelty aspects within these tasks include the optimization of reaction conditions and routes to completely new products with expected applications in food but also non food industries such as ten side
manufacture. As a third goal the possible and improved applications of the products prepared in the project will be targeted and special reference will be given ta assess the effect of these products on the growth promotion of probiotic organisms, which are known to have beneficial effects in the human intestine. As a result of these studies the most promising lactose-derived compounds will be selected for the
development of new functional food products.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- agricultural sciences animal and dairy science dairy
- social sciences social geography transport transport planning
- engineering and technology chemical engineering separation technologies
- natural sciences chemical sciences catalysis biocatalysis
- natural sciences biological sciences biochemistry biomolecules proteins enzymes
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Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
1190 VIENNA
Austria
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.