The French Gut at EMBL Human Microbiome Symposium 2025

Published: Sep 18, 2025 by FME Lab

The relationship between diet and the gut microbiome lies at the heart of both health and sustainability challenges. Understanding how dietary habits shape microbial diversity is key to developing new strategies for precision nutrition.

At the EMBL Human Microbiome Symposium, Julien had the pleasure of presenting preliminary results of the French Gut project, carried out at INRAE MetaGenoPolis in collaboration with AP-HP. This presentation sparked lively discussions, with many participants acknowledging the scale of the challenge: deploying such a project across the entire French territory.

The French Gut relies on an exceptional infrastructure, built thanks to the dedication of the entire MetaGenoPolis team. Their work made it possible to collect thousands of standardized dietary questionnaires, transform them into nutritional profiles, and link them with metagenomic data derived from stool samples. Their commitment to building this unique infrastructure is the backbone of the French Gut project. Bravo to the whole team!

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 ↩