About the 5th EGP Symposiums
Cereals are the most important sources of food providing energy, protein, vitamins, minerals and fibre for the world’s population.
A major challenge in cereal biotechnology is to achieve optimal processing to meet specific requirements for improving human health, nutrition, and food quality, to increase the energy supply, and to provide safer and more profitable industrial inputs.
The production of cereal based foods is based on complex interactions between ingredients subject to natural and environmental variations and processing techniques. Owing to the complexity of interactions in cereal grains, in which enzymes act at the interface of soluble and insoluble surfaces, the rational design of enzymes with specific functionality is highly desired.
Our fundamental biochemical knowledge of exogenous and endogenous enzymes together with recent developments in biotechnology, particularly in areas such as protein engineering and directed evolution, have provided important tools for the efficient development of new enzymes. This has resulted in the development of enzymes with improved properties for established technical applications and in the production of new enzymes tailor-made for entirely new areas of application such as functional foods.
The European Symposium of Enzymes in Grain Processing, launched in 1996 by TNO has consolidated his position in the field through successive Symposiums held by VTT (1999), KU Leuven (2002) and INRA-Nantes (2005), providing a forum for researchers and technologists across academia and industry to share in recent progresses and exchange ideas and future directions for the use of enzymes in grain processing.
