2024 <scp>AOCS</scp> annual meeting and expo special issue

This special issue is a collection of selected work presented at the 2024 AOCS Annual Meeting and Expo featuring papers by authors from Argentina, Belgium, China, France, Morocco, and the United States. Three review papers and four original articles are included across a wide variety of topics. Review topics include biofuels, flavor of sesame seeds, and sustainable enzymatic oil degumming. Original papers include topics such as antioxidant efficiency in oil-in-water emulsions, oil binding capacity of edible fats, dialkyl-ketone formation during esterification of lipids, and novel extraction methods for almond oil. The review paper by El Doukkali and Dumeignil provides a summary of their work on the production of carbon-neutral propylene, 1,2-propanediol, and biohydrogen through thermo-chemical conversion of biomass-derived glycerol, using various heterogeneous catalysts. Shifting from biofuels to processing, the review paper by Dr. Mensella's group (Val et al.) describes recent research and development of thermostable PLC enzymes including the economic and ecological impact of this effort. Another processing-related work is the review paper by Dr. Xu's group (Xu et al.) that discusses flavor variations of roasted sesame seed oil as affected by various processing conditions, including roasting and extraction. This review also includes a discussion of a grading system to evaluate sesame seed flavors and how to improve the production efficiency of the oil. Among the original papers, the work by Dr. Villeneuve's group (Barea et al.) evaluated olive extracellular vesicles and synthetic liposomes as carriers of antioxidants to stabilize oil-in-water emulsions against oxidative degradation. Three original papers related to edible applications technologies are published in this special issue. The paper by Marsh et al. evaluated the oil binding capacity of a palm-kernel-based fat as affected by processing conditions, while the work by Goncalves Dias et al. reported the effects of aqueous and enzymatic extractions on the quality of almond oil. Last but not least, the work by Dr. Danthine's group (Karra et al.) quantified the formation of dialkyl-ketones in various fats processed through chemical and enzymatic interesterification. The 2024 AOCS Annual Meeting & Expo Special Issue is full of innovative and state-of-the-art research demonstrating that JAOCS continues to be the leading peer-reviewed journal in the area of fats, oils, proteins, and related materials. I hope you enjoy browsing through these papers as much as I did. See you at the 2025 AOCS Annual Meeting in Portland in a few months! The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.