EVALUATION OF BOVINE MILK PROCESSING ON THE DIGESTIBILITY AND ALLERGENICITY OF DAIRY PROTEINS
cow’s milk, allergy to cow’s milk protein, allergenicity, digestibility, milk processing.
Brazil is the fourth largest producer of bovine milk in the world and the internal consumption of milk and dairy products is 230 liters per inhabitant per year, with the consumption of fluid milk of 60 liters per inhabitant per year. Milk is considered a protein food of high nutritional value, as the proteins of this food have high biological value, besides being rich in fats and minerals. It is already known that the different forms of milk processing impact milk ultrastructure and the interfaces between the fat and protein micelles, impacting the gastrointestinal digestion of them. Furthermore, such structural modifications in milk may lead to a change in allergenicity responses to milk proteins by modifying the exposure of protein epitopes. Thus, this project intends to evaluate commercially available milks, processed by different technologies, including pasteurization, ultrapasteurization with and without the addition of homogenization, besides evaluating milks with different fat concentrations. In this way, the project will analyze the ultrastructure of these milks using biochemical tools, such as electrophoretic and chromatographic, and will subsequently subject these milks to the simulation of the human digestion process, re-evaluating the digested contents, by the mentioned techniques, besides the bioaccessibility of them and their free essential amino acids in the small intestine. Finally, the digested milk samples will also be evaluated for the allergenic potential in vitro, using the enzyme-immunoassay technique for caseins and whey proteins. At the end of the project, it is expected to correlate the different forms of milk processing in the impact of digestibility and allergenicity of milk proteins, generating results to support innovation for the productive sector and for public policy regulators.