Colours from waste: our team at IWA&B 2026 in Salamanca

This July, our ChromaQuest team travelled to the historic city of Salamanca, Spain, to take part in the 12th International Workshop on Anthocyanins & Betalains (IWA&B 2026), held from 15 to 17 July 2026 and hosted by the University of Salamanca - one of the oldest universities in Europe. It was an inspiring few days, and we came home with full notebooks, new collaborations on the horizon, and plenty of fresh ideas for where our research on anthocyanins goes next.

IWA&B brings together researchers from around the world who share a fascination with the plant pigments that paint nature in everything from warm reds to deep blues and purples. For a project like ours - built around turning berry processing waste into stable, natural colourants -it was the perfect room to be in, and we were proud to contribute three poster presentations to the programme.

Alise Zommere - Turning berry waste into stable colourants: co-pigmentation strategies

Anthocyanins are beautiful but notoriously unstable, which limits their use as natural colourants. Alise explored co-pigmentation as a way to fix that - using extracts of invasive plants, Japanese knotweed and Canada goldenrod, to protect the colour in press residues from six different berries. The results were striking: Japanese knotweed extract meaningfully reduced colour loss even under demanding, high-temperature conditions. It's a promising, plant-derived route to more durable natural pigments, with the bonus of putting invasive biomass to good use.

Evelina Klavina - Nanocellulose matrices from invasive plant biomass for anthocyanin stabilisation

Evelina tackled the stability challenge from another angle: building carrier materials to hold anthocyanins in place. She produced cellulose nanofibers from three widespread invasive plant species and tested how well they could adsorb anthocyanins from berry extracts. The nanofibers proved to be effective carriers, and the approach cleverly turns an ecological problem - invasive plant biomass into a sustainable raw material for functional pigment applications.

Linards Klavins - Effect of drying temperature on berry press residue anthocyanin stability and profile

Berry press residues are a hugely underused by-product of the juice industry, and they are packed with valuable anthocyanins. Linards presented a systematic look at how different drying methods and temperatures affect how much of that goodness survives. The work identified freeze drying as the gold standard for retention, with vacuum drying at 45–60 °C emerging as a genuinely practical, energy-efficient alternative and pinpointed a critical degradation threshold above 75 °C. By mapping which anthocyanin structures are resilient and which are fragile, the study offers a real roadmap for industry to valorise berry waste rather than discard it.

What we brought home

What made these three posters click together was a shared thread: tackling the central puzzle of anthocyanin instability, and doing it sustainably by drawing on by-products and invasive biomass that would otherwise go to waste. Seeing our drying, co-pigmentation, and nanocellulose work side by side sparked plenty of conversation including how these strategies might be combined into more robust stabilisation systems.

The discussions with fellow researchers were, as ever, the real treasure of the conference. We picked up new perspectives on how to test our materials under real-world conditions of light, temperature, and pH, made connections that could grow into future collaborations, and left energised about the next phase of our anthocyanin research. Salamanca gave us a lot and we can't wait to build on it in the second part of the project!

This work is carried out within the Latvian Council of Science project "Biorefinery-derived Functional Ingredients for Enhanced Conjugate Stability of Natural Dyes through Co-pigmentation — ChromaQuest" (project No. lzp-2024/1-0066).