Starch

Our group is active in starch science and technology taking on challenges within health-promoting foods and biocomposites.

Starch is probably the most important energy deposit in Nature and we generate designer starch by state-of the-art DNA-free Crispr-Cas9 genome editing and molecular models by chemical synthesis to understand how its well-organized packing is compromised by efficient bioavailability.

Since starch is also the major food for most organisms and we investigate the interaction of starch with environmental enzymes to design healthy foods, biocomposites and bioplastics, efficient enzymes for clean modification of starch and more robust, disease-resistant and high yielding starch crops. We work on important starch crops such as potato, barley, maize, wheat, mungbean etc.

 

 

  • Fundamentals of starch structure, metabolism and dietary functions
  • Bioegineering of crops for starch functionality and disease resistance
  • Enzyme technology for functionalizing starch
  • Plant-based foods, chemistry, texture, rheology and nutrition
  • Bioderived, all-natural and compostable bioplastics for packaging

 

 

 

  • Improvement of the potato tuber by genome editing: Disease resistance and starch quality
  • Clean, enzyme-assisted modification of starch for nutrition and bioplastics purposes
  • Polysaccharide-based biocomposites
  • Starch nanoparticles for drug release and nutrient protection

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • GlycAn: The glycoanalysis unit at Section for Plant
  • Glycobiology
  • Infrastructure and integrated glycoanalysis resources
  • Chromatography
  • Carbohydrate Microarrays
  • GlycoSpotTM
  • Rheology

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Group members

Name Title Phone E-mail
Andreas Blennow Professor +4535333304 E-mail
Bent L Petersen Associate Professor +4535333379 E-mail
Frida Meijer Carlsen Guest Researcher +4535334073 E-mail
Ida Westberg PhD Fellow +4535325457 E-mail
Marwa Mohamed F Mohamed Abdalla Postdoc +4535332712 E-mail
Yongxian Chen PhD Student   E-mail
Yu Tian PhD Student   E-mail
Zhihang Li Enrolled PhD Student   E-mail

Master students

Camilla Frederikke Skovbjerg: cfs@plen.ku.dk

Research group leader

Andreas Blennow
Professor
abl@plen.ku.dk
+45 35 33 33 04