Insights on the gastrointestinal digestion of food from a mechanistic and structural perspective

Marta Martínez-Sanz is a Principal Investigator in the research group Food Proteins in the Research Institute for Food Science (CIAL, CSIC-UAM) in Madrid (Spain). Her scientific interests focus on the multi-scale structural study of different biomass sources and their correlation with functional properties to develop strategies aimed at a more efficient use of natural resources in food. In addition, she studies polysaccharide-protein interactions to modulate gastrointestinal digestibility, generating products of interest for food and pharmaceutical applications, enabling the valorisation of new alternative protein sources.

In 2023 she was awarded the National Research Award for Young Scientists "Ángeles Alvariño", in the area of ​​​​natural resource sciences and technologies. She received her ERC Consolidator PRODIGEST project, where she will study the nanostructures formed by the digestion products of food proteins using advanced characterization techniques (such as X-ray and neutron scattering techniques), and she will correlate such structural features with intestinal transport processes.