Scientific insights provide crucial knowledge for AAK to stay at the forefront of helping our customers innovate greener and healthier products.
Collaborations with frontier research groups at top universities and research institutes are extremely valuable to drive and foster research and development at AAK. Partnerships within various academic networks also provide important access for AAK to cutting-edge technology, equipment, and facilities. Furthermore, the generation of new knowledge is helping both AAK and our partners to move the needle further in the effort to create greener, healthier, and more efficient products and processes.
In November 2024, Zehui Dong successfully defended her PhD thesis “Lipase engineering, production and application - Expanding the lipids tailoring toolbox with applied bioinformatics” at the Department of Biotechnology, Lund University, Sweden.
Zehui’s research focused on investigating lipases (enzymes that can be used to modify fats and oils) and how their selectivity may be enhanced via protein engineering to make them more specific and efficient. The project yielded new insights into the function of lipases and how their molecular structure affects the specificity when catalyzing various reactions involving fats and oils. Prof. Eva N. Karlsson supervised the work at the Dept. of Biotechnology, and Dr. Majid Haddad and Dr. Kim Olofsson at AAK. The project was supported financially by the Swedish foundation for strategic research (SSF) and AAK. Parts of the project were carried out in collaboration with the research group of Prof. Jean-Marc Nicaud at INRAe in France, a world-leading researcher in the field of lipase expression systems in yeast.