Rosa Heydenreich
Rosa Heydenreich
Staff of Professorship for Sustainable Food Processing
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Research area
Efficient gentle food preservations techniques are of a high global interest. These emerging techniques aim at inactivating microbial contamination responsible for food spoilage and food-borne diseases. But at the same time, consumer demands for minimally processed food with great taste and high nutritional value should be fulfilled. A major challenge of effective food decontamination presents the inactivation of highly resistant bacterial spores. Due to their resistance, intensive wet heat treatment is mostly applied in the sterilization process which often causes unfavorable loss of food quality. A promising gentle alternative is the so-called germination-inactivation strategy. By inducing germination of dormant spores, spores lose their resistance and become susceptible for subsequent mild decontamination procedures. High pressure (HP) has been shown to trigger germination. However, not all spores germinate equally well under HP and a superdormant subpopulation can remain. A deeper understanding of the causes for superdormancy will be crucial to the development of scalable multi hurdle concepts for gentle food preservation at ambient conditions.
Therefore, Rosa’s doctoral studies focus on the elucidation of spore germination behavior upon high pressure treatment and mechanisms of spore superdormancy.
Born in Dachau (Germany), Rosa Heydenreich studied Chemistry in Vienna (Austria). In 2018, she received her BSc degree in Chemistry from the University of Vienna. Her bachelor's thesis in analytical chemistry was carried out under supervision of Prof. Gunda Köllensperger. Her work focused on the establishment of a quantification strategy for Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) in preclinical metallodrug development. Rosa obtained her master’s degree in Technical Chemistry from the Technical University of Vienna in 2020. For her master’s thesis, Rosa investigated the impact of the unfolded protein response on enzyme secretion in Trichoderma reesei in the research group for Synthetic Biology and Molecular Biotechnology of Prof. Robert Mach. Between her bachelor’s and her master’s studies, Rosa conducted an internship as a researcher in the ophthalmic lens industry at Rodenstock GmbH and an internship at the Department of Biophysical Chemistry of University of Vienna.