Food LEGO: Building hollow cage and sheet superstructures from starch.

ABSTRACT: The idea of building large structures from small building blocks has had a long history in the human imagination, from the beautifully intricate shells assembled from silica by unicellular algae to the Egyptian pyramids built from stone. Carrying this idea into the food industry has important implications. Here, we introduce a Pickering emulsion platform for building superstructures like hollow cages and sheets using starch granules as building blocks. In food, these superstructures occupy up to six times more space than their constituent parts, thereby delivering a viscosity greater by an order of magnitude than unstructured starch. To achieve this higher viscosity, they use an alternative superstructure mechanism as opposed to the classic swelling mechanism of individual particles. These

SUBMITTER: Kierulf A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10871527 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature