Chloe Sermet
Major/Minor: Psychology/Health Science
Title: We Don’t Want To Go Green, We Want Our Sunflower Meal Cookies Pristine
Abstract: Sunflower meal is a product that can be used as a gluten-free alternative as it has very low amounts of allergens compared to soy protein and almond meal. However, in baking, when we mix it with baking powder or baking soda, we are exposing it to high pH and it turns green which makes it unappealing to the food industry. Our goal is to engineer an esterase which is a type of enzyme to fully eliminate greening in sunflower meal by hydrolyzing (breaking down) the compounds that cause the greening. To engineer our enzyme, we will use high throughput mutagenesis where potential residues that increase enzymatic activity will be randomly mutated to all other possible 20 amino acids.
