The growing awareness regarding environmental sustainability has fully reached business reality. Consumers and companies alike are looking for alternatives to mitigate pressing environmental demands resulting from continuous population and economic growth. Recently, plant molecules have attracted attention due to their functional properties, being of great interest for chemical, food and pharmaceutical industries. Literature reports studies on the valorisation of dried coffee waste biomass, mainly spent grounds and silver skin, due to their abundance in high-income countries. In contrast, coffee-producing countries lack in efficient management to keep the wet coffee waste biomass left over from the milling process of cherry beans out of rivers and lakes. This pollution load in the wastewater can be 30-40 times greater than the one found in urban sewage. This issue could be turned into a chance if marketable by-products could be extracted from WCWB greenly for secondary processing.
Moreover, in engineering biology, nanotechnologies applied to biomedicine have considerably changed the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries and concurrently lead to advances in the field of antioxidant therapies. Layer-by-layer (LBL) assembly, driven mainly by electrostatic interactions, is an environmentally friendly nanotechnology for fabricating multilayered coated systems. At Newcastle University we have developed a hybrid automated manufacturing system that integrates immersion and sputtering technologies to produce nano-coated functional products for a wide range of industrial applications (patent WO 2021/079106).
The aim of this multidisciplinary PhD project is to develop value-added products by engineering the valorisation of wet coffee waste biomass to extract phytocompounds and carbon-based materials as building blocks of the LBL-based functional systems. The developed products intend to be used in biomedical applications, particularly in this project the PhD students will investigate them as antimicrobials to treat infectious diseases.
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Reference:
Barrios‐Rodríguez, Y.F., Salas‐Calderón, K.T., Orozco‐Blanco, D.A., Gentile, P. and Girón‐Hernández, J., 2022. Cocoa Pod Husk: A High‐Pectin Source with Applications in the Food and Biomedical Fields. ChemBioEng Reviews, 9(5), pp.462-474.
Application enquiries:
Dr Piergiorgio Gentile, [Email Address Removed],
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/engineering/staff/profile/piergiorgiogentile.html