Project granted: “BYPROVALUE - Multifunctional high-value fungal biomass from the Norwegian agriculture supply chain by-products”

Today, a new project of our Norwegian collaboration partner, Dr. Volha ‘Olga’ Shapaval from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Ås, has been granted by the Norwegian Research Council. This is a collaborative project together with academic partners from Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Brno University of Technology in Czech Republic, WWU Münster, and eight Norwegian companies. The aim of the project is to develop a fungal fermentation process for the valorization of Norwegian agriculture by-products, namely animal fat and protein by-products, rest materials from brewery, and sugar-rich lignocellulose side-streams of forestry. These will be converted into a multifunctional fungal biomass which can be utilized as a whole in animal feed and pet food, or fractionated down to high-value ingredients such as lipids and pigments for feed and food, chitin/chitosan for water treatment, and beta-glucans for medical applications. We will contribute to this project by our analytical expertise, screening for the presence of chitin/chitosan in the fungal biomass, quantifying and characterizing it, building on our experiences from the F2F and FunChi projects. This will be our first, but certainly not our only collaborative project with Olga. Given the excellent experience we had in collaborations with our late friend and colleague Prof. Kjell M. Vårum from Trondheim University that also started with a small project such as this one, we are looking forward to a long-lasting and fruitful collaboration starting early next year.