Chickpeas, protein source

The focus of this chapter is plant protein. Chickpea and soy protein isolates (Salmoral et al, 2000) are two of the more common plant proteins that are used to produce biodegradable plastic film materials. However, there are many other proteins used in film production, including wheat (Bejosano and Corke, 1999), pistachio (Ma et al, 2002), sunflower (Orliac et al, 2003) and peas (Gueguen et al, 1998). Proteins are formed by the condensation polymerisation of various combinations of amino acid repeat units and different plant sources produce proteins with different amino acid combinations and thus exhibit different properties (McGrath and Kaplan, 1997). Their general structure is illustrated in Fig. 11.1. 

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