23/11/2020
greenEV is a new European project granted by the Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) 2019 Individual Fellowships call of Horizon2020 Programme that aims to develop a novel continuous production of extracellular vesicles (EVs) from a sustainable cellular agriculture system. EVs obtained in greenEV will be exploited as nanovectors to deliver bioactives for recipient cells in nutraceutical and cosmeceutical formulations.
greenEV is a two-year project with a total budget of 183 473€ financed by the Research Executive Agency of the European Community. The scientific coordinator is Gabriella Pocsfalvi, Institute of Biosciences and BioResources, Cnr-Ibbr and the experienced researcher is Maneea Mabrouk Abdelkhalk Moubarak from Damanhour University, Egypt. The beneficiary of the grant is the National Research Council of Italy.
In greenEV, the Extracellular Vesicles and Mass Spectrometry (Evs-MS) Group of IBBR-CNR led by Gabriella Pocsfalvi will team up with Prof. Pasquale Chiaiese (Department of Agricultural Sciences, University of Federico II, Italy), Prof. Veronika Krlaj-Iglic (Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) and Prof. Jozsef Jeko (Agricultural and Molecular Research, University of Nyíregyháza, Hungary) to carry out a uniquely interdisciplinary research.
Functional foods boosted with bioactive nutrients to enhance health and mitigating disease conditions are experiencing a rapid progress. Encapsulation is becoming an important strategy to enhance the bioavailability of poorly absorbed compounds and developing healthy foods. In this context, novel nano-scale approaches to create alternative delivery options for nutraceuticals are emerging. GreenEV aims to develop a continuous culturing system for the manufacturing of non-mammalian nanovesicles, and exploit them for the encapsulation, release and bioavailability enhancement of selected nutraceuticals. Cells containing cell wall have been shown to physiologically release phospholipid membrane-surrounded vesicles into the apoplast and the environment. These vesicles are morphologically similar to mammalian EVs. The process that drive the vesicle formation and their release through the semi-rigid cell wall is not trivial, and will be studied in the project. None of the greenEV’s objectives has been addressed before and all have high potential to expand the knowledge in the field and to drive the research activity towards industrialized continuous production of EVs. The research objectives are integrated with concerted training objectives in EV research, omics, outreach program, dissemination events and considerable transfer of knowledge in plant biology from the researcher to the Ibbr host group.
Per informazioni:
Gabriella Pocsfalvi
greenEV sci. responsible
gabriella.pocsfalvi@ibbr.cnr.it