Lyophilization equipment

冻干（冷冻干燥）是一种常规用于使用低温和低压组合从冷冻生物样品和食品中去除水分的技术。 作为一种保存方法，冷冻干燥是对蒸发或脱水所需的较高温度敏感的样品的理想选择，包括许多对食品风味，质地和颜色重要的化合物，以及酶和其他生物分子。 我们的研究主要集中在表征植物和动物中参与脂质代谢的酶，总体目标是增加重要加拿大油籽作物的种子油含量（即，油菜籽，亚麻），增加营养上重要的脂肪酸（即，单和多不饱和脂肪酸），以及开发不需要氢化的健康种子油（即，用于生产不含反式脂肪的产品）。 在我们追求这些目标的过程中，我们正在研究各种油脂生成酶的结构和功能，包括控制这些酶的过程。 这些实验常规地使用来自植物或动物组织的蛋白质提取物，所述蛋白质提取物含有可干扰酶活性测量的天然存在的脂质。 因此，使用冷冻干燥，不仅作为保存所研究的酶活性的手段，而且还用于使组织样品更易于使用有机溶剂去除干扰脂质的程序中。 冷冻干燥设备对于我们了解油脂生成酶的作用的研究至关重要，这反过来将有助于开发一系列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.