Entry Date:
April 8, 2019

Preventing Food Spoilage to Feed More People

Principal Investigator Markus Buehler

Co-investigator Benedetto Marelli


Spoiled fruits and vegetables make up a large share of the food that goes to waste globally. What if some of it could be saved? MIT-IBM researchers are experimenting with AI to extend the life of perishable food by designing new structural biopolymers to serve as edible fruit and vegetable coatings. They are using machine learning tools to analyze the amino acid sequences that make a biopolymer edible, nontoxic and stable. They will then model the shape of their predicted biopolymers to see how their properties change. The researchers will synthesize the best biopolymer candidates in a lab to validate their predictions.