Het effect van processing op functionele eigenschappen van voedingsmiddelen op basis van plantaardige grondstoffen.

This project tries to understand the effect of processing on functional properties of plant based foods. We will focus our work on texture/rheology including cloud stability, in a later phase we will expand our work studying the effect of specific and well characterized structures on nutrient bio-accessibility. The main scientific goals are: - The validation of results obtained through ex situ pectin analysis, on the structure-function relations of pectin through in situ studies on the effect of processing on pectin changes. - The identification of a possible (pre-)processing role of the enzymes affecting the pectin backbone structure or the branched areas of pectin as indicated by recent plant physiology related literature data. - To investigate routes for inter-chain interaction mechanisms by probing for pectin cross-linking mechanisms. - To link molecular, nano-scale, microscopic and macro-structural changes and relate these different levels to the texture/rheology of plant based foods - To include relevant processing variables (time, temperature, pressure, humidity) representing different unit operations including thermal processing, high pressure processing, freezing and frozen storage, evaporative drying and, freeze-drying and rehydration.

Keywords:antibodies, structure-function, pectinases, texture, pectin

Disciplines:Food sciences and (bio)technology