Adri­an Tron­coso-Ponce, an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at UTC, spe­cial­izes in the study of plant metab­o­lism. He is also the head of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment and the coor­di­na­tor for the “sus­tain­able engi­neer­ing” label with­in the UTC-GEC lab­o­ra­to­ry. He is cur­rent­ly work­ing on the “Squale” project, fund­ed by INRAE since 2025.

After work­ing at INRAE, Adri­an Tron­coso-Ponce joined UTC. He quick­ly became inter­est­ed in the issue of squa­lene, a lipid extract­ed from shark liv­er. This lipid, which occurs nat­u­ral­ly in the skin’s sebum, plays an impor­tant antiox­i­dant role. As a result, the cos­met­ics indus­try is a major con­sumer. It is also used in dietary sup­ple­ments and as an adju­vant in cer­tain vac­cines. This led Adri­an Tron­coso-Ponce to con­duct research aimed at find­ing a plant-based alter­na­tive to reduce the reliance on over­fish­ing of sharks. “The INRAE research team has devel­oped a large num­ber of plant lines, includ­ing ama­ranth lines—a plant that pro­duces squa­lene in much greater quan­ti­ties than oth­er plants. For the ‘Squale’ project, INRAE pro­vid­ed us with ama­ranth seeds; our role is to under­stand the ‘why’ behind this high squa­lene pro­duc­tion in ama­ranth. To do this, we will extract the squa­lene plant sub­sti­tute from each seed to deter­mine, among these lines, which one pro­duces the most and which the least and to iden­ti­fy the genes involved in the pro­duc­tion and accu­mu­la­tion of these metabo­lites,” he explains.

The gene expres­sion results for this vary­ing squa­lene pro­duc­tion across the dif­fer­ent lines will then be trans­ferred to INRAE’s Depart­ment of Applied Biol­o­gy. “The large-scale pro­duc­tion of plant-derived squalene—in this spe­cif­ic case, from amaranth—will ulti­mate­ly make it pos­si­ble to reduce our depen­dence on, or bet­ter yet, our use of, lipids derived from shark liv­er, as well as avoid the use of trans­genic tech­niques,” con­cludes Adri­an Troncoso-Ponce.

MSD