Food Lipids: Chemistry, Nutrition, and Biotechnology

ming as compared with chemical neutralization and soapstock splitting are due to
lower oil loss, less consumption of water, and very little effluent wastes of environmental
concern.
V. PERSPECTIVES
Lipid biotechnology is a very young discipline. Although breathtaking progress has
been made in genetic engineering for alteration of composition of oilseeds and oils
(see Chapter 30), the commercial applications of biotechnology for the production
and modification of fats and oils using whole microbial cells and isolated enzymes
are restricted so far to a few areas, such as enzymatic production of cocoa butter
substitutes, human milk fat replacers, and bio-ester as well as enzymatic degumming
of fats and oils. Factors limiting the application of biotechnology in the area of lipids
include the productivity and the cost of downstream processing in microbial processes
and the price as well as the reuse properties of enzymes, such as lipases. In
this regard, optimism is raised in the current literature, which contains numerous
research activities aimed at development of novel lipid-based specialty products as
well as mass fat products, such as feedstocks for margarines using biotechnology.
With increasing production and use of enzymes in detergents one might foresee the
commercial bulk scale availability of such biocatalysts at competitive prices that
should facilitate their applications in wide areas of lipid biotechnology.
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