German Institute of Food Technologies The division has its own research projects planned for 2013. The quality of food is determined by their structure. Therefore, an optimization of food structures leads an improvement of long-term quality of food. Based on test on structure generation and the interdependency with the quality of food the DIL tries to increase the shelf-life of products. When the Bio-Economy division was founded in 2012, it was accompanied by an extensive realignment and expansion of the research platforms. As a result, meat technology was removed from the Process Technology business division, the biotechnology focus was placed on enzyme and raw material
Time-varying covariate Time-varying covariate A time-varying covariate (also called time-dependent covariate) is a term used in statistics, particularly in survival analyses. It reflects the phenomenon that a covariate is not necessarily constant through the whole study. For instance, if one wishes to examine the link between area of residence and cancer, this would be complicated by the fact that study subjects move from one area to another. The area of residency could then be introduced in the statistical model as a time-varying covariate. In survival analysis, this would be done by splitting each study subject into several observations, one for each area