Beta-galactosidase

Technical Data

Type of Protein	Enzyme
Protein name	Beta-galactosidase
Companies producing this protein	Classado Amano Enzyme DSM (both GMO and non-GMO) Novonesis Danisco
Function (dairy alternative, colorant, texture, taste...)	Hydrolysis of lactose (Fernandes, 2018)
Target application (cheese, infant formula, meat...)	Producing lactose-free (dairy) products, production of galacto-oligosaccharides (prebiotic) (Saqib et al., 2017).
Purity requirement/purification values	Has been purified at 95% (Chen et al., 2008)
Techno-functional properties	Hydrolyzes lactose into glucose and galactose (Kaushal et al., 2022)
Nutritional properties	No real nutritional properties itself, the main nutritional properties come from the hydrolysis of lactose (see target application).
Advantages	Active in a broad pH range (Movahedpour et al., 2021) β-Gal-treated milk is sweeter, so there is no need to add sugars in milk drink products treated with β-gal. Cheese manufactured from β-gal-treated milk also ripens more faster than normal milk (Meena et al., 2018).
Challenges/risk factors	Suffers from product inhibition: the generated product D-galactose inhibits the reaction of β-gal (Bechtel et al., 2024)

Escherichia coli

Bacillus subtilis

Kluyveromyces lactis (GM)

Kluyveromyces lactis (non-GM)