Bob Rastall

My main area of interest is in functional food ingredients. Specifically:

• Structure-function relationships in fermented carbohydrates in the diet.
• Development of novel prebiotic carbohydrates with a range of functional enhancements over the current market leaders. Several disease states and vulnerable population groups are being targeted by this research.
• Design of prebiotics targeted at specific microbial groups in the gut microbiome. This approach is allowing the development of rationally designed synbiotics.
• Utilisation of food waste as sources of functional food ingredients. Current work is focussing on plant biomass as a source of candidate prebiotics.
• Development of enzymatic synthesis approaches for oligosaccharides based on the use of microbial and plant glycosidases as synthetic catalysts. This is allows us to create a range of novel, potentially bioactive, structures.
• Development of controlled enzymatic hydrolysis technology for manufacture of oligosaccharides. This facilitates the production of controlled molecular
• weight ranges in functional carbohydrates.
• Production of microbial polysaccharides, polysaccharide degrading enzymes and bacteriophage by fermentation.
• Manufacture and evaluation of oligosaccharides that act as receptors for pathogenic micro-organisms.