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This new baby is designed to accompany the growth of this lab, and will be continuously growed up! This is created based on a academicpages template and hosted on the GitHub pages now. We also used the Google domains to create our domain and manage it.
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Our recent work on the creation of the plant-based adipose tissue analogs using an emulsion technology has been published in the Food Structure. This work was mainly carried out by the Xiaoyan, and Lu also helped her to make up additional experiments. Congradturations to Lu and her collaborators. Read more
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Lu had a pleasant journey to the 2022 Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) conference in Chicago! Full of harvest! Lu got the chance to present my recent work “Development of Proposed Tests for the Characterization of Beef Burgers and Their Plant-Based Analogs”. Read more
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This work investigated the impact of different cooking procedures (pan frying, air frying, and oven baking) on the physicochemical properties of beef and plant-based patties, in particularly the influence of cooking temperature and time on the appearance, texture, cooking loss, and shrinkage. Read more
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This is their first time to receive the First Place TTC 2022 Student Video Competition Contest Winner. They creatively used the Texture Analyzer to compare the difference in physicochemical properties of both real beef meat and plant-based meat. Great job! Here is their creative video. Read more
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This work used the RuBisCO protein as the plant protein ingredient for the development of plant-based egg white analogs. They formulated this new plant-based egg white analogs, and also compared their appearance, rheology, and thermal gelation with the real egg white. They found that the viscosity, gelling temperature, and gel strength of the analogs were similar as those of real egg white. Read more
Background: Many inorganic nanoparticles (INPs) have recently been synthesized and used in the biological research area. It has showed that they likely induce the autophagic effects and thus lead to a dysfunction of our cellular system, due to their unqiue physicochemical properties. However, it is still unclear whether these properties (such as size, morphology, surface modification and dispersity) can significantly induce the autophagic effects.
Funding: This project was funded by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (2013CB933901, 2014-2018). Hualu also completed her master graduate program and research thesis. She was thus awarded a master degree in the chemical biology at Xiamen University, due to her excellent performance.
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Background: Inorganic or organic nanoparticles are often incorporated into foods to enhance their quality, stability, nutrition, or safety. When they pass through the gastrointestinal environment, the properties of these nanoparticles are altered, which impacts their biological effects and potential toxicity. Consequently, there is a need to understand how different kinds of nanoparticles behave within the gastrointestinal tract.
Funding: This project was funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, USDA, Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station (MAS00491, 2017-2020), and the Chinese Scholarship Council for financial support (2017-2020). Hualu also completed her Ph.D. graduate program and awarded a Ph.D. degree in the Food Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst, owing to her excellent academic performance. 
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Background: The plant-based (PB) food, as one of the next-generation foods, have been increasingly adopted by consumers because they are more sustainable, environment-friendly, and have less ethical concerns. However, these PB foods could have different properties from these real animal-based foods, such as the nutritions, taste, and texture profiles. We are using food emulsion technologies to help the development of PB foods.
Funding: This project was funded by the Good Food Institute (2020) and partly by the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station (MAS00559) and USDA, AFRI (2020-03921) grants.. Hualu is working as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Massachusetts Amherst. 
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Background: Many beneficial lipophilic bioactives (such as vitamins and polyphenols) have low bioavailability, because of their poor solubility and chemical stability within the human gut. Although using advanced nanocarriers (e.g., nanoemulsions) can improve their solubility and stability, there is still a need on how we can effectively encapsulate, protect, and deliver them orally.
Funding: This project is currently a main ongoing project, and we are expecting it has more funding supports in the future. 
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