A virtuous multi-step biorefinery platform to convert urban biowaste into valuable molecules, not disregarding renewable energy and digestate production. The strategy is based on the integration of a thermal pretreatment capable of significantly increasing the fraction of fermentable organic carbon, in order to furthermore change the status of the feedstock to become more suitable for production of a) high-value bio-based molecules, b) biomethane and c) hygienized digestate to be recycled as biofertilizer.
Technologies
In this section it is possible to view, also through targeted research, the technologies inserted in the PROMO-TT Database. For further information on the technologies and to contact the CNR Research Teams who developed them, it is necessary to contact the Project Manager (see the references at the bottom of each record card).
Displaying results 1 - 12 of 12
In the last years, hop culture has spread throughout Italy, and the vegetative biomass disposal, after harvesting of cones, used for beer production, became a serious problem for hop growers. Hop plant contains in all parts, cones, shoots, leaves and roots, bioactive compounds, with proven and important antiviral, antibacterial and antioxidant properties.
Our idea come from the improving of the traceability technique in agro-food fisheries industries through the application of omics technologies in microbiota studies. These latter would be capable of exploiting the huge pool of biological molecules contained in fishery resources (e.g. nucleic acids, proteins, metabolites) and use them as a powerful tools for the identification and reconstruction of fishery history, from the sea to the table.
Detection devices for the presence of molecules of interest (analytes) enjoyed a renewed burst with the introduction of biological components (biosensors). Their high specificity is often used in various fields, from environmental monitoring and biomedicine to the protection and promotion of agri-food products. However, the high cost of production and the lack of compatibility with mass sampling (high-throughput) sometimes limit their use.
Uniform coverage with porous layers over extended surfaces is beneficial for many purposes. Depending on the nature/composition, thickness and interfaces of the layer, this kind of special coverage can assure pivotal properties such as transparency, bendability, high surface reactivity, intermixing capability. In the long list of desired porous materials, transparent oxides find application in the fields of Photovoltaics, Sensing, Photocatalysis, Water Purification and Splitting, Lithium Batteries and many more.
The object of the technology is the development of a transferable methodology from the laboratory scale to the pilot scale to be validated in the industrial setting for the treatment of basic waste of natural polymers of agro-food or manufacturing industry.
We have identified compounds that show a neuroprotective action in vivo, in models of neurodegenerative diseases (e.g. SMA, Parkinson, Alzheimer, Huntington) in the model organism C. elegans. These compounds consist of: mixtures of 22 natural extracts, 15 natural molecules and 11 synthetic molecules.
The systems simulate, with high reproducibility, the conditions that occur in the different compartments of the gastrointestinal tracts and are promising to accurately mimic the digestive process, with the possibility to evaluate bioaccessibility and bioavailability. Moreover, the systems permit to study the synergic and reciprocal effects between the bioactive compounds characteristic of food and intestinal microbiota.
Plants can compete favorably with traditional expression systems (mammalian cells, yeasts or bacteria) to produce recombinant proteins/peptides of pharmaceutical/industrial/agrifood interest. This technology names “Plant Molecular Farming”. The CNR-IBBA research team offers the study of new strategies for the expression and optimization of recombinant proteins/peptides in plant-based systems (plant tissues, transgenic plants, plant cell culture). Our pipeline is based on the following modules:
Environmental contamination is a prominent topic. Where the exposure to contaminants such as heavy metals (HMs) or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) is greater, the incidence of chronic degenerative diseases, such as oncologic, is increased. Scientific evidence reports that some phytochemicals are able to interact with HMs and PAHs by interfering with their cellular metabolism, inhibiting their cytotoxic mechanisms or helping to reduce tissue concentrations.
Grape pomace, a by-product of wine-making, is rich in polyphenols, metals, organic acids and can become a functional ingredient in food and beverage. The stabilisation of the pomace has been optimised to preserve the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties of the molecules present. Isolated grape skins have been reused in purity or in blends with other plant components as a base for: 1) herbal teas, 2) ready-to-drink functional beverages, 3) freeze-dried products.
Our team can develop low-cost ultra-flexible sensors integrated on plastic substrate for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and gas detection. These devices combine scalable fabrication technologies, implementing active materials such as nanostructured metal oxides or stack of nanostructures decorated with metal nanoparticles, thus enabling a high sensitivity (in the range of hundreds of ppb). These devices can be applied to numerous industrial and commercial sectors and they can be embedded in systems that are more sophisticated.