Improved Secretory Production of the Sweet-Tasting Protein, Brazzein, in Kluyveromyces lactis.
High-fructose corn syrup and sugar are on the outs with calorie-wary consumers. As a result, low- and no-calorie alternatives have become popular, and soon, there could be another option that tastes more sugar-like than other substitutes. Scientists report in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry a step toward commercial production of a fruit protein called brazzein that is far sweeter than sugar – and has fewer calories. Brazzein has high stability over a wide range of pH values and temperatures, due to its four disulfide bridges.
Brazzein first attracted attention as a potential sugar substitute years ago. Making it in large amounts, however, has been challenging. Purifying it from the West African fruit that produces it naturally would be difficult on a commercial scale, and efforts to engineer microorganisms to make the protein have so far yielded a not-so-sweet version in low quantities. Kwang-Hoon Kong and colleagues are working on a new approach using yeast to churn out brazzein.
Working with Kluyveromyces lactis, the researchers coaxed the yeast to overproduce 2 proteins that are essential for assembling brazzein. By doing so, the team made 2.6 times more brazzein than they had before with the same organism. A panel of tasters found that the protein produced by this approach was more than 2,000 times sweeter than sugar. https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2016/acs-presspac-august-17-2016/how-a-protein-could-become-the-next-big-sweetener.html?_ga=1.170104034.39578037.1424618366 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jafc.6b02446
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