Dr Bernadine Flanagan

She uses her skills in spectroscopy, extraction techniques and analytical chemistry to examine the relationship between food structure and function. Her work has focused on the structural characteristics, digestibility and fermentability of starches and dietary fibres.

She has optimised a range of techniques to isolate dietary fibres from plant foods and uses a suite of established analytical techniques such as spectroscopy, microscopy and colorimetric assays to characterise how they change during digestion and fermentation. She uses a batch fermentation system to compare the fermentability of complex dietary fibres using human faecal inoculum. Providing insights into how the chemistry and architecture of dietary fibres affects the digestion and fermentation of starches and dietary fibres. She has also established a method to quantify Short Chain Fatty acids and other fermentation metabolites.