Sowmya Narsipur publishes her new work on yeast biomass in Food Chemistry

Sowmya Narsipur (PhD Student, CDT Molecules to Product) publishes her paper titled "Utilisation of yeast biomass to stabilise oil-in-water emulsions" in Food Chemistry. In this work, Sowmya in collaboration with Dr. Ben Kew (NAPIC R&I Fellow), Qifei He (Masters student from Sarkar Lab) and other co-authors investigated the ability of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and two non-conventional yeast biomass to stabilise oil-in-water emulsions. Saccharomyces cerevisiae biomass indeed offered better emulsion stabilising properties than the other two non-conventional food-grade yeast biomass with no coalescence or phase separation observed for 4 weeks in the former. However, emulsions prepared using washed Saccharomyces cerevisiae biomass were found to be less stable than the unwashed ones. This alongside limited biomass at the droplet surface seen through confocal microscopy and coalescence rate analysis using light scattering data suggest that surface proteins such as mannoproteins at the surface of the biomass were essential in stabilising yeast biomass-based emulsions via potentially a molecularly stabilisation mechanism. Overall, this suggests that yeast cell-stabilised emulsions might not be stabilised by a pure Pickering mechanism as often reported in literature. Ongoing studies are focusing on isolating which specific mannoproteins at the surface are contributing to this emulsion stabilisation effect. The full text can be followed here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2025.146572