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A regular dietary supply of plant proteins is widely recommended. However, their use as an ingredient is limited by the fact that they have an inherently low water solubility and a heavily aggregated fraction. To better understand and control this aggregation, we developed a medium-throughput screening tool working by droplet-based millifluidics. This experimental setup made up of cheap and commercial off-the-shelf tubing and connecting, considerably reduces the size of the devices, the required quantity of raw materials, but also the reaction and analysis times. Using millifluidics made it possible to use ten times less material and run experiments five times faster than with a conventional-scale tubing system approach, while at the same time being less expensive than microfluidics and requiring less expertise to deploy.

Participants

This project was funded through an INRA–Region co-sponsored PhD project and was also partly financed by the CEPIA division’s ANS MicroPro program.

Publications

C. Amine, A. Boire, J. Davy, M. Marquis and D. Renard, Droplets-based millifluidic for the rapid determination of biopolymers phase diagram. Food Hydrocolloids, 2017, 70, 134-142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodhyd.2017.03.035

C. Amine, A. Boire, J. Davy, M. Marquis and D. Renard, Associative properties of rapeseed napin and pectin: Competition between liquid-liquid and liquid-solid phase separation. Food Hydrocolloids, 2019, 92, 94-103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodhyd.2019.01.026