University of Manitoba

Purpose

In recent years, microfluidic devices have started to make inroads in more traditional areas such as agriculture with special focus on separation and detection of micro- and macro-nutritional compounds. Some barriers to more widespread uptake of pulses into preparations of food include a naturally occurring deficiency in sulfur-containing amino-acids and the presence of anti-nutritional compounds. Enhancement of pulse protein quality and functionality through performance-enhancing breeding and processing is underway. The development of rapid testing methods for the presence of anti-nutritional compounds and sulfur-containing amino acids in pulses in parallel with breeding, would facilitate the process. The laboratory benchtop-length scales that have in the past been employed with plant science, such as the testing of pulses, can be reduced by harnessing the power of microfluidics integrated with novel optical detection methods.This intent of this Project is to harvest the well-established microfluidics technology provided from the NRC Medical Devices Research Centre, coupled with a highly sensitive optical detection method to develop a new testing platform for analyzing targeted nutritional components extracted from pulses.