IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT COMMENTS

COMMENTS HAVE BEEN DISABLED

Because of spam, I personally moderate all comments left on my blog. However, because of health issues, I will not be able to do so in the future.

If you have a personal question about LI or any related topic you can send me an email at stevecarper@cs.com. I will try to respond.

Otherwise, this blog is now a legacy site, meaning that I am not updating it any longer. The basic information about LI is still sound. However, product information and weblinks may be out of date.

In addition, my old website, Planet Lactose, has been taken down because of the age of the information. Unfortunately, that means links to the site on this blog will no longer work.

For quick offline reference, you can purchase Planet Lactose: The Best of the Blog as an ebook on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. Almost 100,000 words on LI, allergies, milk products, milk-free products, and the genetics of intolerance, along with large helpings of the weirdness that is the Net.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

"Milky Way Alliance" Yields LactoYIELD

Thank the Dutch. Dutch firm Gist-Brocades invented the process that made lactase drops and lactase pills commercially available. Now two more Dutch firms, the Chr. Hansen/Novozymes joint venture they call the "Milky Way Alliance," says they've invented a new way of ridding dairy of lactose.

In their press release, the details of the new process are revealed:

The Chr. Hansen/Novozymes strategic alliance which was formed in 2002 debuts a new solution marketed under the name LactoYIELD™. LactoYIELD™ converts lactose into lactobionic acid, LBA, in an enzymatic process. An advanced enzyme innovation with unique opportunities both inside and outside the food area.

"Jointly, Chr. Hansen and Novozymes have developed a process that enables industrial application of lactose oxidase, a member of the cellobiose oxidase enzyme class," explains Per Munk Nielsen, Senior Science Manager, Novozymes. "The proprietary enzyme and enzymatic process enable 100% conversion of lactose — of which the biggest cheese producers out there have a lot — into LBA. Until today LBA has been produced by costly non-enzymatic chemical reactions and primarily in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics areas."

Proof of concept
Treading new ground, the enzyme alliance has proof of concept within cheese production. "This new, proprietary process allows cost-effective manufacturing of large amounts of LBA from the whey stream in a cheese processing plant," explains Hans Christian Bejder, Marketing Director, Chr. Hansen. "LBA can be added as a dry matter into pizza cheese without influencing the properties of the cheese."


Lactobionic acid (LBA) has the chemical formula C12H22O12. Lactose has the chemical formula C12H22O11. They're both disaccharides, that is made of of two simpler sugars. Lactose is of course glucose and galactose; LBA is gluconic acid and galactose. Gluconic acid is a natural sugar found in fruit and honey.

A process that turns lactose into another similar sugar should be valuable for the dairy industry and maybe for consumers as well. No telling when we'll see the results in commercial products, but any time you can glibly throw around lactobionic acid in a post is an opportunity to be treasured.

Bookmark and Share

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Do I understand corectlty, lactobionic acid is able to be incorporated into cheese matrix> Or is this a by-product made from whey(lactose) that then you can add to cheese?