Recovery of value‐added glycopeptides from edible bird's nest (EBN) co‐products: enzymatic hydrolysis, physicochemical characteristics and bioactivity

BACKGROUND Processing of edible bird's nest (EBN) requires extensive washing to remove impurities and produces huge amounts of EBN co‐products, which contain mainly feathers with glycoproteins attached, which are usually discarded. This study was conducted to recover the valuable EBN glycoproteins from the waste material. Enzymatic hydrolysis was applied to recover EBN glycopeptides from EBN co‐products (EBNcoP) and processed cleaned EBN (EBNclean) was used as control, which were then freeze‐dried into EBN hydrolysates (EBNhcoP and EBNhclean, respectively). RESULTS The recovery yield for EBNhclean and EBNhcoP were 89.09 ± 0.01% and 47.64 ± 0.26%, respectively, indicating nearly 50% of glycopeptide can be recovered from the waste material. Meanwhile, N‐acetylneuraminic acid, a major acid sugar in EBN glycoproteins, of EBNhcoP increased by 229% from 58.6 ± 3.9 to 192.9 ± 3.1 g kg−1, indicating the enzymatic hydrolysis removed impurities and thus enhanced the N‐acetylneuraminic acid content. Total soluble protein was more than 330 g kg−1 for all the samples. Colour parameter showed that hydrolysate samples have greater L* (lightness) values. Chroma result indicates the intensity of all the samples were low (