UVIGO: Presentation and role in the project

UVIGO is a public educational and scientific institution founded in 1990. Its 22 faculties are distributed in three specialised Campuses (Vigo, Ourense and Pontevedra), all of them located in the south of Galicia. Nowadays, more than 20.000 students are enrolled in this university and more than 1.400 professors form the academic staff. UVIGO has managed 84 European Projects in the last 5 years (period 2016-2020). UVigo has successfully managed over 23.2 M € in grants received from diverse EU funds and programmes in the last years (period 2008-2016).  

The Campus of Ourense, known as Water Campus, is leader in research and teaching in matters related to water, environment, agro-food industry and sustainable development. Its strategic projection has been recognised by the Galician Autonomic Government by funding the Agrifood Research and Transfer Cluster (CITACA) as a dynamic strategic research center in the UVIGO integrated by more than 125 researchers from the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela, and researchers from the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) (Portugal), the RTD ANFACO-Cecopesca (Spain) and the Marine Research Institute of Vigo (CSIC, Spain). From a multidisciplinary point of view, CITACA pretends to contribute to improve the environmental sustainability and competitiveness of the agri-food sector and guarantee healthy food and water for the Society.

The Agricultural and Food Research Group (AA1), founded member of CITACA, will be involved in this proposal through the Laboratory of Biochemistry as they have a direct expertise in the field of protein chemistry and enzyme technology which are central to the current proposal. Indeed, within this field the Laboratory of Biochemistry has expertise working on milk whey proteins and proteins from tuna waste waters and muscle, and producing macro and nanogels as well as active peptides by applying enzymatic hydrolysis and fractionation/purification methodologies. The final destination of gels and peptides was their incorporation into food to improve rheology or to provide functional properties, processes that have been scaled up to pilot plant scale. These achievements have been done in close collaboration with researchers from the UVigo Laboratory of Thermophysics, also involved in this proposal, and different food companies, and some patents have been written regarding the new processes and products developed. Finally, the UVIGO group has a close experience working in collaborative projects dealing particularly with the in the valorization of by-products from the ago-food industries as coordinator and active partner in the BiValBi (" Biotechnologies to Valorize the Regional Food Biodiversity in Latin America") European Project.

In order to support the in vivo bioaccessibility assessment studies, the Group has been reinforced with the participation of the Endocrinology Group (LabEndo) from the Biomedical Research Centre (CINBIO) of the University of Vigo, that have experience performing overall balance studies with animal experimental subjects and access to the Bioexperimentation Service of the UVIGO (Sbio) located at the CINBIO.