Ural Federal University: Students Begin Creating Oil-Based Emulsions for Foods
The Ural Federal University and the South Ural State University started cooperation in the field of progressive biotechnologies. This year, four Master’s students from Ural Federal University completed an internship at the university in Chelyabinsk under the supervision of researchers from the Laboratory of Synthesis and Analysis of Food Ingredients (School of Medical Biology) of the South Ural State University.
As part of this project, students will be trained to make double emulsions based on oils for their subsequent use in products. A new format of cooperation and joining efforts of two scientific teams will lead to the creation of new technologies in such an important sphere as food production, says Irina Potoroko, Head of SUSU Department of Food and Biotechnology.
As Elena Kovaleva, Professor at the Ural Federal University Department of Technology of Organic Synthesis, notes, Ural Federal University chemists are engaged not only in food technology, but also in industrial technology, developing methods of extracting biologically active substances from food and plant raw materials. The team is ready to accept students interested in internships.
“We have developed project-based learning, and, for example, Master’s students from Ghana and Nigeria are also doing semester projects. We want to put this work at the heart of their group project, where they will learn how to make special food emulsions based on oil. This is a promising technology that will improve the quality of food by adding natural emulsions. We hope that this unusual format of university cooperation will become a regular practice. Our goal is to get real orders from enterprises,” explains Elena Kovaleva.
One of the Ural Federal University’s industrial partners in this project is the company “Tabletka” (Ekaterinburg). The company is engaged in organizational and technological engineering in chemical technology, biotechnology, and ecology.
“We get involved already at the stage of commercialization and marketing of the finished product. We work in a triple helix system – education, science, and production. Employees and students of the UrFU are interested in evaluating their developments in terms of implementability. We need to get production interested in our developments, because manufacturers always know better what the market needs. Recently there has been a trend towards non-standard food products. This direction can be developed further, making emulsions more stable, forming emulsions so that they have useful properties and a pleasant organoleptic taste,” says Aleksey Byuler, General Director of the company.
Aleksey Byuler believes that it is possible to produce emulsions, due to which the food will contain the necessary nutrients in a bio-available form. Thus, the products will have the properties of dietary supplements, making up for vitamin and mineral deficiencies.