Use of Biotechnology to Enhance Soy Protein Ingredients

The ability to produce high quality protein ingredients from vegetable instead of animal sources has significant opportunities to improve production efficiency via improvements in the utilization efficiency of water and energy during protein ingredient manufacture. Among the vegetable sources of protein, soybeans have a long history of use for both humans and production livestock, in part due to their superior nutritional quality and cost in use relative to proteins from other sources. Utilization of soy protein ingredients in human food products has typically been limited by comparative sensory and functional property limitations relative to protein ingredients from dairy, egg, and meat sources. Biotechnology in many forms has been widely used in the development of improved soybean protein ingredients, including conventional breeding, germplasm screening from plant introduction and mutational breeding populations, molecular biological transformation via recombinant DNA techniques, and enzyme modification. This chapter provides several examples of the improvement in the sensory and functional properties of soy protein ingredients in food products through the use of enzyme modification and crop molecular biology.