Can you turn an orange into a grapefruit? #StartedinOxford
Capturing the scent and flavour of a grapefruit is incredibly difficult and costly.
Around 400,000kg of grapefruits are needed to produce just 1kg of the flavouring used in products such as drinks, desserts and sweets.
Now Oxford scientists have developed a way to use enzymes to modify naturally occurring compounds found in an orange… so that they smell and taste like a grapefruit!
This technology, from Oxford Biotrans, doesn’t stop at fruit. In the future everything from industrial compounds to medicines might be made this way.
Using sustainable biology to produce valuable chemicals, the process is also highly environmentally friendly, as it produces less chemical waste and consumes less energy.
What’s more, the World Wildlife Fund believe that the development and uptake of products and processes like these could save 2.5bn tonnes of CO2 per year – equivalent to taking 490 million cars off the road!
How’s that for a juicy new bit of tech?
Video made by Angel Sharp Media Ltd.