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  Copyright: © Peter Drabo

Research

Chemocatalytic production of rare sugars

The number of people suffering from diseases like diabetes type 2 or obesity has strongly decreased over the last decades, especially in industrialized countries. At the same time, living a healthy lifestyle is a growing trend and diet products containing less sugar or calories are gaining more and more in attraction.

Allulose, a C6 sugar, presents a superior sweetener in comparison to artificial sweeteners like aspartame, acesulfame k etc. It is natural occurring, posses nearly no calories, shows a good taste profile and has positive effects for industrial food production. Since it is scarce in nature, it is produced biotechnological by epimerization of fructose. However, the high production costs make the search for a suitable chemo-catalyst highly attractive as it could allow for an overall more economic process.

Research interests:

• Catalyst screening for the chemo-catalytic epimerization of fructose to allulose
• Synthesis and characterization of a heterogeneous catalyst for the selective conversion of fructose to allulose
• Optimization of the reaction conditions for sugar-isomerization reactions

Interested? If you would like to perform a research on this topic, just send me a mail or come by in person.

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