Research Rosaria Tizzani

Abstract

Europe must produce healthy and nutritious food within planetary boundaries. The EU Farm to Fork strategy, a central pillar of the European Green Deal, aims to feed nearly ten billion people by 2050 without expanding farmland, increasing freshwater use, or raising greenhouse gas emissions. Current food production systems are environmentally unsustainable. While most innovation focuses on alternative proteins only, microbial foods offer a broader opportunity by delivering both sustainable protein and health-relevant bioactive compounds. In particular, antioxidants such as carotenoids and coenzyme Q10 play an important role in protecting against oxidative stress and chronic diseases but remain largely underexploited in food biotechnology. This project advances purple bacteria (PB) biotechnology as a scalable microbial platform for producing protein- and antioxidant-rich foods. PB combine rapid growth, metabolic versatility, and the capacity to convert low-value carbon substrates, including side streams from carbon capture and utilization, into nutrient-rich biomass under resource-efficient conditions. The project aims to contribute to such sustainable food platform by isolating robust haloalkaliphilic strains and systematically characterizing their antioxidant production potential. A mechanistic process model will be developed to decouple biomass growth from antioxidant induction, enabling the design of optimized cultivation strategies. In parallel, food-grade downstream processing approaches will be evaluated to ensure efficient recovery of proteins and antioxidants while preserving product quality and digestibility

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Vlaeminck Siegfried
• Co-promoter: Diaz Allegue Luis
• Fellow: Tizzani Rosaria

Research team(s)

• Biobased sustainability engineering (SUSTAIN)01/10/2026 - 30/09/2028

Funding

• FWO

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project