Research using the Australian Synchrotron to understand how milk is digested, to drive innovation in products that deliver nutrients to infants, received a boost on Friday when a collaborative team from Monash University and the Australian Synchrotron were awarded a Discovery Projects Grant from the Australian Research Council.
The grant, worth $523,000 over 3 years will build on the discovery in March this year that human breast milk forms into highly organised structures at the nanoscale, during digestion in the body.
Monash University’s Professor Ben Boyd (pictured right), a Principal Investigator on the successful grant with Dr Adrian Hawley (pictured left) from the Australian Synchrotron’s Small and Wide X-ray Scattering (SAXS/WAXS) beamline, says delivering new understanding of the processes of milk
‘Milk is the most important food for human survival, providing all the essential nutrition to newborn infants and constituting a major part of the adult diet.’
‘We recently discovered that a nanostructure is formed during the digestion of both cow and breast milk and, through this funding, we will investigate this nanostructure formation as part of a broader effort to develop new food supplements and nutritional formulas that are more easily digested.’
Minister for Education and Training, Senator Simon Birmingham, who announced the funding in Adelaide on Friday as part of the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Major Grants Announcement, said that the funding is a strong investment in research excellence and the future health of Australian research.
‘A strong investment in high-quality research will drive innovation, secure the jobs of the future, improve the health of our community, protect our environment and ensure our researchers can compete on the international stage.’
Other research projects to be awarded today with close research links to the Australian Synchrotron (Soft X-ray beamline) include the search for more efficient energy generating, storing and transmitting material that will allow a break away from conventional silicon based transistor technology, led by Dr Mark Edmonds from Monash University, and research to create nanotechnologies to sense traces of chemical and biological molecules, to improve air, water and food safety and pharmaceutical and cosmetic products, led by Dr Luhua Li from Deakin University.