Dr. Saleha Akter

Dr Saleha Akter is a Post-doctoral Research fellow in the Centre for Nutrition and Food Sciences (CNAFS) at Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) at the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. Her research passion lies in understanding the nutritional composition and assessing the safety of foods. She has expertise on determining bioactive (antioxidant, antimicrobial, antidiabetic, antiinflammatory) and antinutritional (phytates, oxalates, trypsin inhibitors) properties of foods. Her research expertise also includes using in-vitro simulated gastrointestinal digestion models to evaluate bioaccessibility of phytocompounds. She has expertise on using in vitro mammalian cell lines and applying cell culture techniques to evaluate the in vitro absorption and bioavailability of bioactive phytochemicals and determining cell viability/cytotoxicity of phytocompounds in foods. She is passionate about understanding the biotransformation of phytochemicals and nutrients and determining gut microbiota mediated metabolites of phytocompounds. Her future research endeavours are exploring the enzymatic and microbial degradation mechanisms of the bioactive phytochemicals and their metabolites and identification and characterization of the gut microbiota in health promotion and disease prevention.