Alimentos Funcionais Inovadores para Satisfazer Necessidades Nutricionais: de germinados de Nano-Enriquecidos a Saladas e derivados de Frutas

The major goal of the GERMINAR is to develop new smart DDS for highly efficient nutritional supplementation of food products, aiming to fight specific nutrient deficiencies, particularly pernicious anaemia. The project addresses important challenges since it is expected to create novel approaches to solve nutrient deficiencies by the ingestion of the newly developed functional food products, particularly sprouts and, in the future, other plant-derived sources. GERMINAR will therefore have a positive outcome for the society since food products will have a better nutritional profile thus having an unquestionable benefit on consumers’ health and reducing health costs for the government. It will have an indirect impact in the economy by promoting sustainable agriculture, generating healthier plants, reducing losses and supplementation costs due to the use of smart DDS. The advantageous use of nanotechnology to the nutritional enrichment of sprouts is less explored in the literature and, to the best of our knowledge, there is no mention to such an approach combining different nutrients, particularly vitamin B12, folate and iron simultaneously given to plants. In addition, the use of grape leaves to produce NPs is already reported but not for the purpose defined in the present application, concerning sprouts supplementation with a nanotechnological multi-nutrients supplement. In face to this, we consider that the proposal embraces 2 big areas of knowledge: Nanotechnology and Nutrition. Ultimately, we expect that the developed functional food products can reach the agri-food industry. As a long term objective, collaborations with the industry, namely with Nutrigreen®, Vitacress® and Frulac®, are expected to be established to evaluate the supplementation effect in already available food products and possibly include these new products in companies’ offer to the food consumers. In parallel, we expect to contribute to reach some of the goals defines for the NORTE “Regional Smart Specialization Strategy (EREI)” as well as for the “National Smart Specialization Strategy (ENEI)”, as detailed described in the section 4 of this proposal. Moreover, GERMINAR will have a positive impact in the career development of the research team members, particularly for the PI. The approval of the proposal will open the possibility to enlarge national (FFUP, FCUP; ICBAS, UCP) and international networking (Lodz U. Technology; Hutton Institute) and simultaneously contribute the formation of ungraduated students (at least one BsC and one MsC students). Regarding the dissemination of the results, we plan to organise sessions/workshops for the general public, potential commercial partners, and for the scientific community. Along the project, we also aim to publish a at least 4 scientific papers describing the most relevant results obtained, in international journals of high impact, and participate in at least 4 national and 6 international conferences. Overall, GERMINAR also aims to fulfil the mission of the host research unit, LAQV@REQUIMTE, by using sustainable strategies to reach the technological updates required to address the biomedical challenges underlying global health problems.