Our Research

 

Developing nature-derived food-grade nanostructures is a ideal stratedgy to rationally desgin functional food structures for improving food technofunctionalities and enhancing nutrional values. However, the bottleneck is the high heterogenity of food compounds and templating the uniform nanostructure with high mechanical and chemical proproties.    

Food protein nanofibril, produced from edible food proteins from foods, such as milk β-lactoglobulin, egg white lysozyme, oat globulin and soy whey protein, has recently emerged as a promising strategy for enriching protein functionality and developing sustainable, biocompatible and edible materials. Nanofibrils are the linearly aligned protein self-assemblyies of natural food proteins after typically thermal treatment. This nanostructure in the diameter of a few nm are formed through the secondary structural transition in the fibril core during the self-assembling process. Typicallly, this food-grade protein nanofibril possesses excellent intrinsic properties including high surface-to-volume ratio, rich surface chemistry, outstanding mechnical strength, biocompatibility and biodegradability.

Our previouos research mainly based on food protein nanofibrils, focusing on the following catagories:

We explored sustainable plant proteins for nanofibril formation, including cereal proteins such as oat and rice, legumes proteins such as cow pea, chickpea, black bean, lentil, kidney bean and mung bean, as well as oil-seed protein such as hemp and pumpkin seeds. We aplied the molecular and mesoscopic investigation to assess the morphology, mechanical and chemical property of these nanofibrils.

We also try to explore the fundamental mechanisms understanding of these fibril formation and behaviors.  These features enable the rational design of food structures with higher technofunctionalities and novel nutrition delivery system of vitamines, minerals and other bioactives. Besides, this system allows the development of biomedical and functional materials for nanotechnology and environmental science.

    Beyond protein nanofibril, we also keen on natural material including cellulose, silk fibroin, collagen and polysaccharide, as well as sythesized polymers such as PLA and PCL.

Current Research Interests

Sustainable Proteins

We seek sustainable proteins from plants, sea food, novel high-protein sources, industry by-products and food waste to replace the traditional milk and egg protein for high-quaility, affordable and sustainable protein nanofibrils and other protein nanostructures. These efforts are expected to advanced buiding block of protein nanostructures and hybrids for the scaled-up applications in food science and human nutritions.

Fundamental & Novel Mechanisms

We explore the fundamental principles of protein self-assembling process, the intrinsic properties of protein nanofibril, their interactions with macromolecules and nutrients at nanoscale. This understanding could help us to better appreciate the novel mechanims including protein-nutrients interaction and stimuli-regulated fibril dissembling. These understanding at nanoscale and microscale can be possible applied to design the materials for the applications, such as nanocarrying nutritients, promoting the absorption, and provide human health.

Plant meat & Cultivated meat

We use the sustainable and novel protein nanofibril to design compatiable, food-grade and strong hydrogel as scaffold for cultivating meat.

We also try to desging the nanoscale-microscale-macroscale structure to increase the mechanical property of material that mimic the high-textured plant meat.

Food fortification and oral nutrition delivery for human health

How to make the food healther? Food fortification is one effective strategy to provide micronutrients, such as vitamins and minerals, to improve food nutritional quality and thus contributes to the prevention and reduction of micronutrient deficiency-related diseases. 

We found that our food protein nanofibril system exhibits the superior advantages to carry, stablize, delivery the multiple micronutrients with high loading capacity and minimized aggregatioin. Remarkably, it also further promotes the human absorption efficiency of these valuable molecules.

Compatiable biomedical material for human well-being

Nature-derived nanostructures often showed a high biocompatibility but often limited by low mechnical strength. Protein nanofibrils, with a beta-sheet amyloid core, exhibits a high mechanical strength and a rich surface chemistry allowing the rational design of hydrogels for various biomedical applications.

Natural functional materials

Natural proteins from plant and industry by-products offer sustainable, low-cost and eco-friendly proteins for producing self-assembled nanofibrils for scaled-up environmental and technological applications.