Soy has brought RUDN PhD students a 2nd place in Open innovation startup tour project

«You are what you eat!», says Damir Shafigullin, postdoc student of Agrarian -Technological Institute who elaborated the project «creating new sorts of vegetable soy».

Today soy is a very debatable product advertised by some and considered just fashionable and totally useless by others. Damir says that we should not completely refrain from animal protein making soy additional source of protein, amino acids and nutrients.

Unfortunately American soy so spread in the world is grain soy not suitable for healthy nutrition. In Japan, where one fourth of consumed food is soy, this soy is vegetable, very difficult to grow in Russia due to climatic conditions. That’s why in Russia we are compelled to use grain soy. 

Damir and the team – Ekaterina Shmelkova, Ida Bashkirova and scientific advisor professor Murat Ghins studied the plant to grow vegetable soy in Russia. There are three ways of growing vegetable soy – analytical, i.e. selecting the best seeds from all over the world and choosing the best to make a new population. The second way is crossing different sorts of vegetable soy and adapt it to our climate. The third way is making soy haploids to further cultivate them in vitro to speed up the selection process.

Damir is a postdoc student of full-employment PhD program In March 2017, his team participated in «Startup Tour» contest aimed at selecting the most innovative businesses, where RUDN team won the 2^nd place out of 550 projects, which was a perfect feedback for their work. The next task is to prepare project presentation at «Startup Village» in June, Moscow.