OBSERVATION OF CATABOLIC ABILITY OF PROTEASE
IN DIFFERENT FRUIT JUICE WITH GELATIN AND THE
OPTIMAL OPERATIONAL CONDITION FOR PROTEASE IN
PINEAPPLE JUICE
1. Introduction
Enzyme are proteins that act as catalysts to carry out specific reaction in any bio organism. Enzymes have the capability of reducing activation energy barrier and thus accelerate the metabolic reactions. There are roughly 4000 different enzyme varieties known to man, and this is because through evolutionary history, enzymes has developed specific functions and shapes to accommodate different biochemistry processes. The shape of an enzyme determine the different substrates it is able to attach and thus created enzyme specificity (Wescott and
Klibanov, 1994).
Proteolytic enzymes, also called proteases are a group of enzymes that exist in plants, bacteria, animals etc. One of the common functions of proteases is protein degradation and it is doing so by break protein down into fragments and further into amino acids. The importance of proteases has been realised by recent research as its increased role in biological regulations (Perlmann et al.,
1970). Proteases are prominent in tropical fruit with bromelain in pineapple, papain in papaya and ficin in Figs (Gall et al., 1994).
Research of proteases has led to rapid development of its use in the food industry
(F. Gibbs, 1999).
Bromelain is a proteolytic enzyme commonly found in pineapple, and is typically extracted from the stem part of the fruit. It is heavily used in food processing as

an effective meat tenderizer because of its ability to catabolize protein (Kim and Taub,
1991). It is also suggested by some of the recent research that bromelain can play an important role in blockage of kinase-2 being activated in T cells (Mynott et al., 1999).
Gelatine is a protein that commonly made from collagen of