Pox-MUSCLE

I´ve always considered this blog a personal thing and always wanted to keep my professional issues apart. However, this time I've decided to show the report I've written for the Annual Review of my department (Applied Chemistry and Microbiology). Here, in Finland, I do something more serious than just travel around and go to parties. Like this, those who don´t know what I'm doing here in Finland can have a general idea.

There it goes...

Dr. Mario Estévez, Marie Curie Fellow in EU Pox-MUSCLE Project.

“You are doing research on the forefront of meat science!”. Those were the exact words pronounced by Eero Puolanne (Professor in Meat Technology at Helsinki University, my mentor in Finland and foremost, a honest man I am honoured to call my friend) after reading the abstracts of the communications I will take with me to the 54th International Congress in Meat Science and Technology to be held next August in Cape Town (South Africa). I was grateful for such a compliment but I knew he was, as usual, right. During the preparation of the EU-Project draft, I was aware that we were designing an extremely challenging research project that had high possibilities for being selected and funded by the EU Commission. The Pox-MUSCLE Marie Curie project is devoted to study the occurrence, factors and consequences derived from the oxidation of proteins in muscle foods and to the development of successful antioxidant strategies to inhibit the unpleasant effects of protein oxidation. The relevance of the present project is explained by two facts: i) the evident lack of knowledge on this issue and ii) the great significance of the results that we are obtaining in terms of the overall understanding of precise chemical mechanisms involved in the fate of proteins in postmortem muscles and in terms of the application of the results in real foods, characterising the risks derived from the oxidation of proteins and establishing successful strategies to inhibit such risks in muscle foods. According to our expectations, the project will provide novel, sound and impact results which could be relevant for other research fields since the experimental design for muscle proteins and natural antioxidants could be applied to proteins from other foods such as fish and dairy products. The influence of the upcoming results on the meat industry and the consumers’s trends of consumption are more than probable. In fact, after one year of work, I can proudly say that some of the objectives have been fulfilled already by publishing 2 peer-reviewed articles, sending 2 posters to International Congresses and participating in other research and docent activities. Of course, I would not be able to do this by my self. The reason why I am doing this post-doc stay in Finland is because I wanted to work with best research group in Europe working on oxidation issues and I knew that Marina Heinonen (Supervisor in Chief of the Project) was the leader of that group. Together with the excellent supervision by Dr. Heinonen, I am fortunate to count on the wise advice of co-supervisor Prof. Puolanne and the priceless help of other colleagues (Vellimatti Ollilainen, Petri Kylli, Riitta Kivikari) and skilful technicians (Miikka Olin). The possibility of working in Finland and complete this great research work is a unique opportunity to gather invaluable personal experiences and obtain a valuable professional maturity which would allow me keep on working in Spain at the highest scientific level.