Atomic single molecule biopolymers

The ramifications of nanotechnology in the food arena have yet to be fully realized. This requires further research into biopolymer assembly behavior and applications of nanomaterials in the food industry. Researchers should keep abreast of the development of research tools and what is being done to push resolution limits for techniques such as atomic force spectroscopy or the synchrotron coupled to various spectroscopic techniques and higher resolution microscopy. New techniques should be exploited and the knowledge gained used to understand the dynamics and interactions of food materials at the single-molecule level and to describe assembly behavior in quantitative thermodynamic terms. There are questions about the interactions of nanoparticles with the food matrix and within the human body. These questions need to be addressed by future research (Simon and Joner, 2008 Sletmoen et ah, 2008). 

The volume of neutron data on biopolymer-water systems is small [60,82,83]. In fact, the case of water close to different residues of a biological material is certainly more interesting for future applications. However, the situation is also more complex due to contributions such as the hydrogen atoms of the protein itself, the possibility of their exchange with water molecules, and the presence of hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions. Studies of the single-particle dynamics of hydration water in proteins have been hampered by the fact that about 40% of the constituent... 

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