■Obtention of bioactive compounds enriched plants from food and by-products

The team includes two permanent research scientists and two doctors in permanent technical positions.

Multidisciplinary team with wide scientific experience and complementary capacities to carry out basic and applied research in the study of the health benefits of plant bioactive compounds.

The Group ‘Innovative Processes and Food Quality’ is characterized by its experience in the use of innovative technologies for food processing. Currently, the research team is made up of two Tenured Scientists with complementary training: a PhD in Agronomical Engineering (Laura Otero) who is expert in characterization, modeling, and simulation of processes and a PhD in Pharmacy (Miriam Pérez Mateos) who is expert in food quality and development of restructured products and functional foods.

Activity related with the quality and safety of fishery and aquaculture products. At present the main objective is centred a) in the design and development of strategies to reduce the risk of parasites present in seafood in terms of their viability and allergenicity, and b) in the development of methods to authenticate the treatments given to the fish to reduce this risk, or in the detection of fraude.

The group is a reference in the study of dairy fat with extensive experience in the characterization of lipid compounds both in food and biological matrices.

The work of the group is focused in two main research lines: 1) food safety and health; 2) enzyme obtainment and characterization to improve the food quality. The first research line covers the study of both, foodborne pathogens and other gastrointestinal bacteria and his interaction for consumer wellbeing. The second research line addresses the identification of microbial enzymes which is useful to improve food quality and safety.

Activities related to the study of healthy components of food and by-products from food industry, his modifications and his application to obtain new sources of food ingredients. Activities related to the study of antinutritional factors in vegetable food. Activities related to the study of melatonin and its relation with antioxidative stress Activities related to characterization of vegetable extracts with high antioxidant activity obtaining form different vegetable sources

The research group started with the beginning of the research activities at the ICVV in January 2009. At present, three staff scientist are members of the group, in addition to one staff technicians. The rest of the group members is maintained thanks to the public calls for personnel formation, or hired using funds from national and international research project or contracts. Our group uses genetic and genomic tools and resources to study the reproductive development in grapevine, aiming to generate useful information to increase quality in grape production and grapevine breeding.

The research work of the group focuses on Molecular Biology of lactic acid bacteria and other microorganisms of oenological relevance, and the overall objective is to generate knowledge as well as obtaining biotechnological applications.