Project Details

Description

Leaf2Food contributes to the circular, sustainable food systems. The cross-disciplinary collaboration will provide the knowledge for scalable solutions to upcycle inedible forage crops and agricultural side-streams into clean-label protein ingredients. Proteins from such green biomasses show high potential as a source of proteins for plant-based foods. Leafy green biomasses contain various proteins, with the majority being the enzyme Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO). Hence, RuBisCO is the most abundant protein on Earth, and, thus, the most resource-efficient protein source available. Though RuBisCO is structurally like other plant proteins, it has an amino acid profile and unique functional properties that surpasses other plant proteins and ability to
replace animal ones. However, proteins from leafy green biomasses are also the most challenging proteins to be used as food ingredients due to their low extraction yield and molecular interactions among components. Current research is based on resource demanding purification. A more sustainable solution is to use less refined leaf protein concentrates (LPCs) from gentle processing. This requires understanding of the molecular interactions between the various molecules in the matrix and knowledge of the dependency of biomass history and processing conditions. The overarching aim is to establish the specific chemical and physical properties of LPCs at multiple length scales.
We will use three different (representative) undervalued biomasses and two fundamentally different processing techniques for production of LPCs, which will be thoroughly characterized by specialized molecular analysis and coupled with analysis of the physiochemical and functional properties. We will, thus, obtain an in-depth knowledge about the molecular interactions, the LPC quality and ingredient applicability.
AcronymLEAF2FOOD
StatusActive
Effective start/end date01/01/202531/08/2027

Collaborative partners

  • University of Copenhagen
  • Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences