Skip to content Skip to primary navigation
Contact us
News

ERC Grant: Renew­able pack­aging from agri­cul­ture waste

23.09.2015
Plants sus­tain­ably syn­thes­ize the most abund­ant and diverse mater­i­als on Earth, includ­ing cel­lu­lose, hemi­cel­lu­loses and lignin. Prof. Mas­ter wants to har­ness these renew­able resources to cre­ate new mater­i­als. Build­ing up of the bene­fits of the gen­om­ic era, she aims to identi­fy nov­el pro­teins and enzymes with totally new prop­er­ties and that can make the plant fibres react in the desired way. Her team will con­cen­trate on less known enzyme fam­il­ies with poten­tial applic­a­tions for industry. They will use mod­ern tech­niques of bio­tech­no­logy to select pro­teins from microor­gan­isms that are act­ive on plant fibres and char­ac­ter­ize how they func­tion. One of the object­ives is to devel­op new meth­ods to increase researcher’s effi­ciency in find­ing pro­teins and enzymes with spe­cif­ic prop­er­ties with­in an extremely var­ied pool of can­did­ates. Their res­ults could advance our under­stand­ing of the bio­logy of pro­teins and uncov­er new ways to pro­cess sus­tain­able mater­i­als. In par­tic­u­lar, Prof. Mas­ter will use plant fibres as a raw mater­i­al for high-per­form­ance, renew­able pack­aging that could become altern­at­ives to plastics. The glob­al mar­ket for such high-value bio­chem­ic­als and bioplastics is rap­idly increas­ing, which presents new oppor­tun­it­ies for forest and agri­cul­tur­al sec­tors.

Pro­ject details

  • Pro­ject acronym: BHIVE
  • Par­ti­cipants: Fin­land (Coordin­at­or)
  • Pro­ject Ref­er­ence: N° 648925
  • Total cost: €1,977,781
  • EU con­tri­bu­tion: €1,977,781
  • Dur­a­tion: Septem­ber 2015 — Septem­ber 2020
  • Cord­is webpage: http://​cord​is​.europa​.eu/​p​r​o​j​e​c​t​/​r​c​n​/​1​9​6​8​8​3​_​e​n​.html
Source: European Commission
All news