Bringing synthetic Ecology in the field of food microbiology

Published: Oct 9, 2023 by FME Lab

The 18th national congress for the French Microbiology Society (SFM) was held in Rennes the 4-6th October. Stéphane was welcome as a guest and gave an introduction conference in the session dedicated to “microbes and functional foods”. He delivered a 25 min talk untitled ”Design of microbial solutions for sustainable and healthy fermented food: perspectives & challenges”.

Key highlights from Stephane’s lecture included:

A diversity of microbial solutions (i.e. microbial consortia)
Strategies for design & experimental bottlenecks
A need for food ‘omics’ databases & ecological network modelling tools
A challenge for implementing health benefits in the design

A specific focus was also given during the presentation to explain the framework of national and European projects running in this field. Stephane’s presentation can be downloaded here.

New tool suite - Food Microbiome Metabolic Modules (F3M)

The FME team has published a new preprint in Open Research Europe entitled
“Food Microbiome Metabolic Modules (F3M): a tool suite for functional profiling of food microbiomes.”
Read the article

A successful outcome of the EMOVOL project

The EMOVOL project has come to an successful end: a fruitful collaboration between INRAE and Fleury Michon has led to the development of a method for characterizing the preservation potential of cooked poultry meat products based on microbial biomarkers in raw meat.

A seed meeting between INRAE Micalis Institute and Imperial College London

Last week on October 3rd, scientists from Imperial College London (ICL) and from INRAE Micalis Institute were hosted by the French embassy in London for a seed meeting around synthetic biology and synthetic microbial ecology as scientific strategies for biotechnology and food production. A special thanks to the organizer: Ludovic Drouin (French Embassy), Young-Kyoung Park (Micalis) and Rodriguo Ledesma-Amaro (ICL). Our several groups with complementary research discussed about perspectives of future collaborations on the field together with Ferment du Futur or Bezos Centre.