Sara Pérez spends eight months at UFRO, progressing with her research that involves an important regional by-product.
The international project ENCAP4HELATH, led by Dr. Francisca Acevedo of the Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) in Chile and Dr. Stephan Drusch of the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) in Germany, seeks to develop more efficient and sustainable processing technologies for encapsulation. Within this framework, UFRO receives Sara Perez Vila, a doctoral student with Spanish nationality from the University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland, as the first doctoral trainee.
The doctoral thesis of Sara Perez, which she develops within the project ENCAP4HEALTH, focuses on the development of new sources of plant proteins obtained from green leafy plants, studying their functionality in order to analyse their behaviour when used in food formulation.
Regarding the objective of her traineeship at UFRO, Sara Pérez comments: “I got the opportunity to work with leaves of the quinoa plant as a starting material to obtain plant proteins. That way, we could achieve the objective of developing more sustainable materials, trying to replace animal proteins with plant proteins on the one hand, and taking advantage of a by-product of the quinoa grain production on the other hand. Overall, the purpose of my stay is to obtain and characterize the proteins of the quinoa plant leaves for their posterior use in the development of protective systems of bioactive substances.”
During her stay, Dr. Francisca Acevedo, who works at the Department of Basic Sciences, the Centre in Translational Medicine (CEMT), and the Scientific and Technological Bioresource Nucleus (BIOREN), and Dr. Mónica Rubilar, who works at the Technology and Processes Unit of the Department of Chemical Engineering, supervise her work.
It is worth mentioning that the regionally renowned company Semillas Baer makes an important contribution to this project, since it supplies two of the four varieties of quinoa leaves.
The objective of the project ENCAP4HEALTH is to promote new, more efficient and sustainable materials for their application in encapsulation systems, identifying new polymers. More than 30 international experts with extensive experience, who come from different institutions, universities, SMEs and multinational companies from Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Argentina, France, Denmark and Chile, carry out this task. The results of this project will provide societal and economic benefits, since they will allow the production of more effective functional food, which leads to a better health and well-being of the population.
“This project offers me the opportunity to study the functional application of plant proteins as an encapsulating medium. In addition, I am able to visit another country, where I now learn new techniques and get to know new colleagues, other ways of working and a new culture,” the doctoral student from the Irish Moorepark Teagasc Food Research Centre said.
