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.

FME at Bioket 2026 advancing synthetic microbial ecology for sustainable food

At the BIOKET (Bioeconomy Key Enabling Technologies) conference in Fribourg, Julien presented recent advances from the SynthPlex project, positioning synthetic microbial ecology as a core tool for next-generation fermented foods.

cFMD workshop in Trento

Last February 23-24th 2026, at University of Trento, a workshop was organized by the CIBIO (Nicola Segata’s lab) for #DominoEU partners. The workshop aimed at learning to query & analyse data from the Curated Food Microbiome Database (cFMD). Thanks to the very efficient and skilled teaching team (vitor Heidrich, Hrituraj Dey, Francesco aniscar, Sergio Andrés Castañeda Garzon) and for the incredible hospitality of Frederica Pinto and Nicola Segata.

From food spontaneous fermentations to food designed consortia

Our new article entitled “Microbiome metabolic modeling as a tool for innovation in fermented foods” has been published in in Current Opinion of Food Science¹.

Elham Karimi, Julien Tap, Marie-Christine Champomier-Vergès, Stéphane Chaillou. Microbiome metabolic modeling as a tool for innovation in fermented foods. Current Opinion of Food Science. 2025 ↩