Lyophilization equipment

冷冻干燥(冷冻干燥)是一种常规使用的低温和压力相结合的方法来去除冷冻生物样品和食品中的水分。作为一种保存手段，冷冻干燥是对通常需要蒸发或脱水所需的较高温度敏感的样品的理想选择，包括许多对食品的风味、质地和颜色以及酶和其他生物分子非常重要的化合物。我们的研究主要集中在鉴定参与动植物脂肪代谢的酶的特性，总体目标是增加加拿大重要的油料作物(即油菜籽、亚麻)的种子油含量。增加种子油、肉类和奶制品中具有重要营养价值的脂肪酸(即单不饱和脂肪酸和多不饱和脂肪酸)的含量，开发不需要氢化的健康种子油(即用于生产无反式脂肪产品)。为了实现这些目标，我们正在研究各种造油酶的结构和功能，包括控制这些酶的过程。这些实验通常使用含有自然产生的脂类的植物或动物组织的蛋白质提取物，这些脂类可能会干扰酶活性的测量。因此使用冷冻干燥。冷冻干燥设备不仅是保存正在研究的酶活性的一种手段，而且还可以使组织样本更易于使用有机溶剂去除干扰脂肪。冷冻干燥设备在我们了解造油酶的作用的研究中至关重要，这反过来将有助于开发一系列用于食品和非食品应用的增值产品。

Lyophilization (freeze-drying) is a technique routinely used to remove moisture from frozen biological samples and foodstuffs using a combination of low temperature and pressure.  As a means of preservation, freeze-drying is ideal for samples that are sensitive to the higher temperatures usually required for evaporation or dehydration, including many compounds important for flavor, texture and color, of foods, as well as enzymes and other biological molecules.  Our research is primarily focused on characterizing enzymes which are involved in lipid metabolism in plants and animals, with the overall goals of increasing the seed oil content of important Canadian oilseed crops (i.e., canola, flax), increasing the amounts of nutritionally important fatty acids (i.e., mono- and polyunsaturated fatty acids) in seed oils, meat and milk products, and developing healthy seed oils that do not require hydrogenation (i.e., for production of trans fat free products).  In our pursuit of these objectives, we are investigating the structure and function of various oil-building enzymes, including the processes that govern the control of these enzymes.   These experiments routinely use protein extracts from plant or animal tissues containing naturally-occurring lipids which can interfere with measurements of enzyme activity.  Freeze-drying is therefore used, not only as a means of preserving the enzyme activity under study, but also in a procedure to make tissue samples more amenable to removal of interfering lipids using organic solvents.  The freeze-drying equipment is of paramount importance in our research on understanding the action of oil-building enzymes which in turn will contribute to the development of a range of value-added products for both food and non-food applications.