AI-assisted food enzymes design and engineering: a critical review

Food enzymes are basic components used for food processing. Through catalysis, food enzymes can function as removing allergy, enriching absorbable nutrients, improving food texture, and adjusting flavors. Food enzymes work in various conditions, which brought out the need for engineering these enzymes with harsh environment tolerance and higher catalytic efficiency. Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently provided solutions for structural modeling, finding modification hot spots, and guiding mutations toward specific needs, which greatly benefit enzyme engineering. AI-based tools showed great advantages in cutting down the computational time, enabling higher prediction accuracy, and providing trainable models suited for wide uses. In this review, we describe the functions and uses of food enzymes, as well as their utility limitations. The necessity and advantages of using AI-based tools in enzyme engineering, and the differences between using traditional and AI-based tools are mainly discussed. Few AI-based tools for enzyme engineering were introduced and described their function. The perspective of using AI tools and the future challenges were discussed.