A large amount of waste is produced by the agro-food industries in the form of 1 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.
The utilization of agro-food wastes has been proposed for animal feed. However, the nutritional quality of these wastes needs to be assessed as they may not meet the 6 standards that are required for that end, in relation to antinutrients, presence of pathogens, allergens, protein and sugar content. Instead, they might be better suited as nutritional ingredients for microalgae, which can then be used as components of, for instance, fish feeds.
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 protein and carbohydrate production, free of pathogens. Currently, both pre-treatment/fractionation technologies and efficient processes of enzymatic conversion are being developed and combined. Mild and environmentally safe processes (such as hydrolysis and anaerobic digestion) are being tested, as viable alternatives to develop scalable technologies and increase energy recovery during product breakdown. The internship will have a workflow devised to follow the different steps of the whole bioprocessing design.
