Masterclass on Food – a challenge but a great success!

The LINXS Masterclass on Food course was a great success - in spite of having to remove the practical experiments, and the challenge of having both physical and digital attendance from several different countries.

Anna Ström, Professor at Chalmers University of Technology, and part of the LINXS Working Group on Food Science and Technology, shares her reflections on organising the course which ran from 1-3 September.

How did the Masterclass go from your perspective?

– It went great! Beyond expectation. It was a challenge for us to put together a course that took place on both a physical and digital platform and with both organisers and students from several different countries. In addition, we also had participants from academia and business, which meant that that some of the participants had to be examined and others not.

The technical part, functioning videos, and the sound, also exceeded expectations, thanks to excellent support from our science activities manager Åsa Grunning. We also had some good discussions between participants via breakout rooms, presentations and direct feedback on written proposals. I also felt that we managed to integrate the needs from business participants and academic participants.

Did you achieve the set-out goals for the course?

– Yes, I think so! Of course, this has also sparked further thoughts on how future courses can be developed, such as more interactive elements, more targeted information for the lecturers, and more.

What do you think excited the participants the most?

– It's hard to know. Many parts of the course were needed, both the more theoretical part where there is perhaps less interaction, as well as the part where the participants applied the theory to their own systems and wrote beamline applications.

For me personally, an episode where we experimentalists discussed openly and unpretentiously with beamline experts such as Stephen Hall and Tommy Nylander, who has long experience of evaluating beamline proposals, was very interesting. It has also been incredibly rewarding to work together with colleagues from LINXS, MAX IV, LU, SLU, RISE and Århus University to organise, plan and run the course!

How could you develop the content in the future?

– The content can always change and develop. For example, we can work even more on interaction and networking between the participants, as we believe that this is a key factor to get started in applying for beamline time, run experiments and, analyse data.

It will also be rewarding if we can include the next step into future courses – where we adapt the different models to the participants' own dissemination data and discuss the implications of different techniques and models and their physical relevance.

Selma Maric, business and industry coordinator at MAX IV, who also coordinated the course adds:

– Next year, we will focus on including more practical elements. Participants will be allowed to do experiments and collect data at MAX IV which they will then analyze together. This element will be of great benefit to participants in terms of immersing themselves in the techniques and to learn by doing.

Reflections from participants

Secil Yilmaz Turan, PhD-student at the Division of Glycoscience at KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, is interested in researching bran, specifically the part of the grain that is not used in food production.

– The left-over cereal bran is often used as animal feed, which I think is underutilized. Instead I want to use it to create films and hydrogels that can be used in cosmetic production or food packaging. Bran is naturally antioxidant so you don’t need to add external antioxidant chemicals for example.

The aim with her research is to explore how the bran can be used to improve packaging, and as a viable alternative to replace fossil-based packaging.

– It was a really exciting course. Before I did the Masterclass, I thought that x-rays and neutrons was only related to size and structure, but now I see that it can also be used to trace metals and imaging food.

– The section on how to write a successful beamline proposal was very useful for me. I learned as a beginner about the importance of knowing your sample beforehand. We got detailed information on how to write the proposal in a better way, especially on how to describe the sample properly and thereby increasing your chances of getting beamtime.

Anja Herneke, PhD-student at the Department of Molecular Sciences: food structures and properties, at SLU, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, is about to start research on plant-based protein nanofibrils and x-ray scattering in Spring 2021.

– I had no prior knowledge of neutrons and synchrotrons, but I wanted to learn more about different methods that I can apply. I plan to look into structures of protein nanofibrils at nano-scale in order to study micro threads. If we have more information of how fibrils behave on a structural level, we can control them better. For example, how we can mimic the structure of muscle cells more accurately in order to create plant based fibrils with similar qualities to meat.

She agrees with Secil Yilmaz Turan, that the exercise in writing beamline proposals was especially useful:

– It was a good way to practice, to pitch your proposal at the last day. The feedback was good – is our plan reasonable? I didn’t know much about this before the course, but now I have more insight into different techniques, and know more about similar types of research to my area, she concludes.

About the course

The Masterclass on Food was an initiative by LINXS Working Group on Food Science and Technology and supported by The Northern Lights on Food network. It provides researchers in the food field with the opportunity to build unique excellence to take full advantage of the new research tools available at the European Spallation Source, ESS and MAX IV Laboratory in Lund.