Sunandita Ghosh: Climbing the Hierarchical Ladder: My PhD story

The complexity of food systems can often be explained in hierarchical levels: small structures self-repeating themselves to organise into larger structures to form fractal networks. The understanding of this structural hierarchy is important to design and control the texture and functionalities of food systems. Such structures formed from plant based products are often used in the food industries as fat replacers and meat analogues. These complexes can also be used to entrap small molecules which may have applications like designing functional food or in drug delivery. My PhD involved studying the molecular hierarchies of these systems to develop new functional food to deliver nutritional compounds like curcumin and folic acid inside the body. This graphical illustration represents the different structural length scales of a protein and polysaccharide complex using Small angle Neutron Scattering.