Development of a novel continuous Extracellular Vesicle production system

Descripción del proyecto

Métodos nanométricos avanzados para lograr unos alimentos saludables

Los alimentos funcionales pueden mejorarse mediante la adición de nutrientes bioactivos para mejorar la salud y mitigar enfermedades. Asimismo, la encapsulación puede emplearse para facilitar la absorción de compuestos con mala asimilación y nuevos métodos nanométricos proporcionan opciones de administración alternativas para los nutracéuticos. El proyecto greenEV, financiado con fondos europeos, se propone crear un sistema continuo de cultivo de tejidos vegetales para la producción de nanovesículas de animales no mamíferos que se utilizarán para la encapsulación, liberación y la biodisponibilidad de nutracéuticos seleccionados. Las vesículas vegetales presentan una morfología parecida a las vesículas extracelulares (VE, o EV por sus siglas en inglés) de mamíferos. El proyecto desarrollará un novedoso sistema de fabricación de VE derivadas de plantas y empleará un flujo analítico integrado para el aislamiento, la caracterización, la encapsulación, la absorción y la descripción toxicológica de VE secretadas por plantas.

Objetivo

Functional foods boosted with bioactive nutrients to enhance health and mitigating disease conditions are experiencing an amazing progress. Encapsulation is becoming an important strategy to enhance the bioavailability of poorly absorbed compounds and developing healthy foods. In this context, novel nano-scale approaches to create alternative delivery options for nutraceuticals are emerging. GreenEV aims to develop a continuous plant tissue culturing system for the manufacturing of non-mammalian nanovesicles, and exploit them for the encapsulation, release and bioavailability enhancement of selected nutraceuticals. Plants cells have been shown to physiologically release phospholipid membrane-surrounded vesicles into the apoplast and environment. These vesicles are morphologically similar to mammalian extracellular vesicles (EVs). The process that drive the vesicle formation and their release through the semi-rigid cell wall is not trivial, and will be studied in the greenEV.

The experienced researcher is a plant biologist with strong background in plant tissue culturing who team-up with the Institute of Biosciences and BioResources (IBBR) with considerable expertise in EV research to realize a uniquely interdisciplinary research program. The research proposed here will realize the following concrete objectives: 1. Set-up a novel, plant-based EV production system, 2. Employ an integrated analytical pipeline for the isolation, characterization, encapsulation, uptake and toxicological profiling of plant secreted EVs. Neither of these objectives have been addressed before and both have high potential to expand the knowledge in the field and to drive the research activity towards industrialized continuous production of plant EVs. The research objectives are integrated with concerted training objectives in EV research, omics, outreach program, dissemination events and considerable knowledge transfer in plant tissue culturing from the researcher to the IBBR host group.