Microscopic containers, known as microcapsules, can be loaded with active components to, for example, enrich our food. Our microcapsules are designed to keep their contents protected from the acid conditions at the stomach, to release them at the more neutral environment of the small intestine.
Instead of taking a synthetic or mechanical route to construct our microcapsules we choose a route involving self-assembly. This means that we took advantage of natural interactions occurring between the materials we used as building blocks, namely oil droplets, protein, pectin, and charged protein fibrils (or colloidal particles) to assemble the microcapsules. More over, protein fibrils are also produced by self-assembly of protein fragments.
We found that the self assembly route gives great control of the microcapsules’ sizes and properties, and that the inclusion of colloidal particles results in very strong microcapsules. We also looked for ways to assemble the microcapsules in a continuous way with the aid of microfluidics.