A large amount of waste is produced by the agro-food industries in the form of discardable by-products (seeds, peels, bagasse, trimmings). Sustainable exploitation of this type of material is key to a circular economy, as it searches to use the resources for as long as possible and to extract the maximum value from them. One side to this endeavour is the development of biotechnological processes that allow to identify and extract phytobiotics to be used as additives (fresh and dried, fermented, or freeze-dried) to animal feeds. Phytobiotics can be expected to regulate digestive processes, increase appetite, improve the absorption of nutrients, inhibit the growth of pathogenic microorganisms, stimulate the immune, reproductive and endocrine systems, and have antioxidant and antiallergic properties.
The proposed internship (suitable for an MSc thesis) is integrated within the activity of the LEBA and LEMM, in evaluating the application of biotechnological processes to re-purpose residues from Mediterranean agro-food wastes as valuable substrates for extraction of bioactive substances, such as natural antibiotics, oils, phenolic acids, flavonoids and the production of useful microorganisms. Currently, both suitable biomass pre-treatment/fractionation technologies are being tested as viable alternatives to develop scalable processes. The internship will have a workflow devised to follow the different steps of the whole bioprocessing design.
