Chymosin

Chymosin is an aspartic acid protease protein that is found in Rennet (Wikipedia 2010). Rennet is found in mammalian stomach, which is produced to aid in the digestion of mammals’ milk and has several complex enzymes. Chymosin acts the active enzyme in Rennet and is used in the production of cheese. chymosin can be naturally found in cows, preferably infant calves because of the abundance of chymosin presence, however, nowadays it is recombinantly produced using E. coli, Aspergillus niger var awamori, or K. lactis as the alternative to the natural cow produced enzyme. Chymosin is important to the food industry for several reasons like aiding in the digestion of milk from the mother for calves and for the beginning production of cheese. Chymosin has become increasingly important because the need to have cheese, has exceed the demand of using natural produced chymosin and therefore other methods have been need to be used to keep production going.
Chymosin is used to make the necessary precipitation and curd formation need in making cheese. This happens when the chymosin cleaves a specific link between the peptide bonds of phenylalanine and methionine in Kappa Casein (Wikipedia 2010). According to Wikipedia, when the reaction occurs the specific linkage between the hydrophobic (para-casein) and hydrophilic (acidic glycopeptide) group of casein inside milk is broken (Wikipedia 2010). These groups then unite to form a netweork trapping the aqueous phase of milk result in the curd form of calcium phosphocaseinate. In its final state, Chymosin is not inactivated since it is natural produce in mammals.
Chymosin is manufactured worldwide in areas like Turkey, Canada and China, by companies like Jiagen Biotechnologies, Inc., GanSu Hialang Bio-Technology Co, and Maysa Gida San Ve Tic A.S. Chymosin has to be made in large quantities because approximately 80% of all cheese production uses chymosin. According to Wikipedia, the top producers of cheese are listed below Top