A New Level of Cooperation with the Netherlands

This is the third exchange of students for joint work on project 'Anthocyan'. In previous years, BSNRU has tested the technology for obtaining anthocyanin from tulips and red cabbage and its use in food products, while Hanze has tested the use of anthocyanin in isolating proteins from potato by-product and its use in lipsticks. Yaroslav Kulchenko, a postgraduate student at the Department of General Chemistry, is currently working under the supervision of a consortium of scientists from our University, Hanze University, Leiden University and Delft University of Technology.

This year project 'Anthocyan' has been expanded. A joint group of Dutch and Russian chemists (both students and post-graduates) worked on making solar batteries with anthocyanin coatings and creating a perfume with the addition of anthocyanins. The initial work will be carried out by students at their respective universities until May, when the Dutch delegation arrives in Belgorod. The joint work will resume in the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory.

In the future, scientific research will be conducted on the selection of sources containing anthocyanins with the properties necessary for the production of solar batteries, as well as for use in perfumes and the production of functional food products. The plan is to obtain multi-coloured forms of anthocyanins and study their properties. A separate project has been designed to study the antibacterial nature of anthocyanins. Another long-term project concerned work on optimising the production of synthetic natural gas. The Russo-Dutch student team studied methanogens using the modern polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method and perfected the design of a bioreactor.

The project was funded by the Erasmus+ exchange program. As part of the program Irina Blinova, Evgenia Tarasenko and Sergei Babarinov gave lectures to Dutch students.