Research Center Profile
Focusing on the major industrial demands for characteristic agricultural products and Chinese medicinal herb resources, the Intelligent Equipment Center for Characteristic Medicinal-food Resource Development devotes itself to the efficient development and utilization of characteristic medicinal-food resources, key process tackling, R&D of complete sets of intelligent equipment, achievement transformation and industrial promotion. The center has filed more than 100 national invention patent applications and obtained over 40 granted invention patents. It has completed more than 20 projects including transformation of high-value food processing technologies and overall process design for food factories. In the past five years, it has led and participated in over 20 national key R&D programs as well as national, provincial and municipal key research projects. The full-chain innovation covering “basic research — key-technology breakthrough — equipment development — product R&D — industrial implementation” has been established to boost quality improvement, efficiency enhancement and industrial upgrading of medicinal-and-food-homologous resources and characteristic agricultural products.
Core Technologies
1.R&D of Separation and Purification Processes for Active Ingredients of Natural Medicinal-food Resources and Complete Sets of Intelligent Equipment: Targeting medicinal-and-food-homologous raw materials and characteristic agricultural products, green and efficient separation-purification processes for active components are developed, alongside automated and intelligent complete processing equipment adaptable to lab-scale tests, pilot-scale amplification and large-scale industrial production. It addresses industrial bottlenecks of conventional processing techniques such as low efficiency, high energy consumption and insufficient automation.
2.Development of High-value Series Products Including Functional Foods, Cosmetics and Snack Foods: Based on functional active substances derived from natural medicinal-food resources, formula design, process optimization and product development are carried out to develop functional foods, skincare cosmetics and distinctive snack foods for the general-health market. It taps into the added value of medicinal-food resources and
3.Developmentof Supramolecular-assembled Nano-delivery Systems for Natural Products and Their Applications in General-health Industry: A technical system for nano-delivery and supramolecular assembly of natural active ingredients is constructed to resolve bottlenecks including poor stability and low bio-availability of active ingredients, and expand application scenarios of such technologies in food, beauty and heal-threlated sectors.
4.Biosynthesis Technology of Active Factors: An engineered microbial synthesis system for terpenoid functional active substances is established. Key enzyme mining, directed modification and functional optimization are performed to construct heterologous cell factories and iteratively optimize metabolic pathways. Integrated with enzyme engineering, AI-driven intelligent protein design and high-throughput screening of biosensors, green and efficient bio-manufacturing of terpenoid active factors is realized.
5.Space-biology Effects and Mutagenesis Breeding Technology: Relying on national space science platforms such as recoverable satellites, Shenzhou series spacecraft and extravehicular exposure radiation devices onboard space stations, space-carrying experiments are conducted on germplasm materials including rice, industrial hemp, probiotics and Chinese medicinal herbs. By deeply integrating space mutagenesis breeding with synthetic biology, a complete innovation chain of “mutagenesis mechanism analysis — elite germplasm creation — breeding technology innovation” is built, providing high-quality new materials for characteristic agriculture and cultivation of medicinal-food plants.
