Sustainable Future Foods: Mechano-Enzymatic Assembly of Complex Food Structures

Soft Matter Biomaterials and Biointerfaces Team in collaboration with Diamond Light Source, Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre and Motif FoodWorks, a Massachusetts-based animal-free ingredient innovation company, are looking forward to train an early stage researcher to PhD level as part of a highly prestigious BBSRC DTP CASE PhD Studentship Programme. Designing sustainable foods requires novel plant-based ingredients that enable creating new textures, whilst unlocking product's functionality in the body. The successful candidate will: 1) Research cross-linking reaction between proteins and polysaccharides (dietary fibre) and evaluate the impact of crosslinking on the rheological (flow) and mechanical properties of fibre. 2) Develop a new extensional flow sample environment system at the I22 Small Angle Scattering and Diffraction Beamline, Diamond Light Source, thus enabling measurements of biopolymer structuring during fluid elongation and formation of a fibre filament. 3) Characterise polymer and water dynamics using NMR spin relaxation and multi-scale imaging techniques at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre. 4) During a research experience placement at the lab facilities of Motif FoodWorks (Boston, MA, USA), research on enzyme functionality and synthetic biology-based approaches for identifying new targets for strain engineering and designing enzymes with targeted activity and specificity will be undertaken. The primary host of this Studentship is the Soft Matter Biomaterials and Biointerfaces (SMBB) Team at the University of Nottingham