Like snakes shedding their skin, cold-water shrimps regularly change their shell, and at about six years old, they are ready for catching. This change of shell is the focus of Signe Vangsgaard’s industrial PhD project. The aim is to establish whether the change of shell can be used to increase yield rates as well as the quality of the shrimps.
“In short, my project is investigating whether you can use nature’s integrity to achieve better-quality shrimps. Shrimps change their shell many times in the six years it takes before they are big enough to be caught, and I’m trying to find out whether the quality is affected by catching the shrimps just before or just after they change their shell,” says Signe Vangsgaard.
Signe Vangsgaard’s research project is done in a collaboration between DTU and the Greenlandic company Royal Greenland, which specializes in everything from cold-water shrimps and snow crab to halibut and cod. Signe Vangsgaard has been to Greenland collecting samples and currently spends most of her working hours in the laboratories at DTU, but the further she gets with her research, the more time she will be spending at Royal Greenland’s test centre in North Jutland.
“Without a doubt, I’m greatly interested in food, I enjoy laboratory work, and I enjoy working with something concrete and finding solutions. So it made a lot of sense for me to look into whether I could do an industrial PhD when I was about to finish my MSc degree in biotechnology,” says Signe Vangsgaard.
With her background, Signe Vangsgaard did not hesitate for long when offered the project by her PhD supervisor Anne S. Meyer, a professor of enzyme technology at DTU.
