Polysaccharides, including those in marine resources, are highly abundant, yet underexploited sources of renewable biomass.

Besides their natural biological and structural functions and their enourmous reservoir of recyclable and green bioenergy, polysaccharides can be engineered to form new materials with novel functionalities for use in foods, pharmaceuticals and even as drugs and medical devices.

The concept of Biopolymer Engineering takes knowledge from the flow of information in Nature from one level to the next one and uses biosynthetic and biochemical pathways to tailor biopolymers for applications useful in industry, agriculture or medicine.

Changes in the chemical structure, including changes in chain lengths, always leads to pronounced changes in physical and often biological properties. A high level of understanding and control of the molecular architecture of biopolymers is crucial in understanding the functional properties and developing targeted functions.

Polysaccharides are polymers and therefore constitute an important part of the polymer science field, the latter also providing numerous methods for characterization as well as concepts to understand their behaviours. Today, biotechnology rapidly adds new approaches to exploit abundant resources, to produce engineered polysaccharides by microbial engineering. New developments towards greener chemistry provide novel chemical modifications to allow new applications.

All this comes together in the key concept Biopolymer Engineering, which has been the overarching strategy of the Biopolymers and Biomaterials research division since the 1990’s.
 

More information about the Research Division of Biopolymers and Biomaterials