Project mission
The BIOCOSM project aims at the development of a biotechnological platform for the sustainable high-yield and scalable preparation of high-value ingredients such as glycerophosphoinositol (GPI) and hydrolyzed vegetable proteins (HVPs). GPI is an endogenous metabolite derived via the action of PLA2 (phospholipase A2) on membrane phosphoinositides and it is involved in immune and inflammatory responses. HVPs are produced by hydrolysis of vegetable proteins and are used in cosmetic products as they confer different properties to the final formulations depending on the peptide size and amino acid sequence.
On this ground, the enzymatic synthesis of GPI has been designed and performed at laboratory scale by using sunflower lecithin as the starting material and commercially available lipases/phospholipases as biocatalysts. Both these enzyme classes are widely used in many industrial applications; therefore, they can meet the requirements of this specific productive process.
The second objective of this project is to upgrade the waste derived from soybean and sunflower seed oil extraction as a valuable feedstock for the production of protein hydrolysates. The use of peptides with specific functions has increased significantly in personal care products as well as the demand for vegetable protein as an alternative to proteins of animal origin. HVPs have been prepared by enzymatic hydrolysis by using commercially available proteases.
