Mathematical modeling for protein folding devices. Applications to high pressure processing and microfluidic mixers.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider two particular devices used for protein folding. The first one is a microfluidic mixer that perform a folding process by mixing a protein solution with a solvent. We are interested in minimizing its mixing time by choosing suitable shape and flow conditions. The second one is related to food processing and we focus on the modeling and simulation of the temperature evolution inside a high pressure food treatment device. Some of the effects of such treatments is to unfold, and thus inactivate, certain enzymes inside the food sample. The behavior and stability of the proposed model is checked by numerical examples. Furthermore, a simplified version of this model is presented and compared in terms of accuracy and computational time.