Last week I had a change to visit a brand new Polli laboratory of the Estonian University of Life Sciences together with our student Elmo. The Polli lab is located in Southern-Estonia near Karksi-Nuia and surrounded by breathtaking landscape with hills and lakes. The Polli laboratory is unique in Estonia as it combines equipment suitable for small scale industrial testing as well as high competence analytical laboratory.
The analytical laboratory is equipped, in addition to other high-tech instruments (including LC/MS etc), with a SFC/MS (super critical fluid chromatography – mass spectrometry) instrument which can be online coupled with SFE (super critical fluid extraction) instrument. The aim of this high-tech lab is to support the development of functional foods produced in Estonia but also to provide research on the functional components of natural products.
The industrial part contains several extraction instrumentation – microwave extraction, supercritical fluid extraction, pressurised liquid extraction – as well as different mixers, lyophilizators, sieves, etc. The extraction equipment is specially chosen so that it would allow production of extracts of functional components for small batches of foodstuff. Also Polli hosts a small lab space for companies interested in applications of functional components in non-foods – such as cosmetics etc.
According to the impression I got from the visit Polli lab is open-minded for different collaborations! Hope that our lab can do some collaborative project soon as we don’t have SFC instrumentation ourself yet and I would also encourage others to investigate the possibilities for collaboration with such nicely equipped centre.
Website of Polli lab: http://www.plantvalor.ee/index.php/home/