Ngoc Thao Ngan Trinh - Researcher in the picture

Ngoc Thao Ngan Trinh (Ngan), a PhD researcher at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering UGent (supervisors: Prof. Thien Trung Le, and Prof. Katleen Raes), is studying bioactivities from phenolic compound extracts obtained from 20 different by-products, as such the broken pieces, underutilized parts, old leaves from Vietnamese spices and herbs.

Some extracts had antioxidative, others had antibacterial or antifungal effects in different in vitro tests, allowing us to test their effects in real food applications. Therefore, after converting the extracts into stable forms by foam-mat drying and/or coacervation, they were applied on Vietnamese traditional fermented meat to test for an increasing shelf-life. Another application test was the ability of the extracts rich in phenolic compounds to inhibit some human health-related enzymes, particularly α-amylase and α-glucosidase, resulting in a potential research direction on glycemia reduction.

This PhD is part of a project financed by VLIR-UOS. It is a collaboration between UGent (Research Unit VEG-i-TEC - Department of Food Technology, Safety and Health - Faculty of Bioscience Engineering), Nong Lam University - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (Department of Postharvest Technology and Food Engineering - Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Food Technology; Faculty of Biological Sciences), and Southern Horticultural Research Institute (Tien Giang Province, Vietnam).