Projects

The overconsumption of sugar is one of the main reasons cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes have reached pandemic proportions. While the obvious solution would be to eat less and make healthier lifestyle choices, the desire for sweetness in our food remains strong. Artificial sweeteners are widely used to lower calorie intake. Several of them, however, are suspected to pose health risks of their own, and many do not taste as well as sucrose, often leaving a lingering off-taste. The development of novel sweeteners is hindered by the scarcity of measurable data on what constitutes an ideal non-caloric sweetener. We aim to develop biochemical assays to determine these metrics, facilitating the discovery of healthy, sustainable, and good-tasting sweeteners.

The consumption of dietary fibres (DF) should be increased to comply with the dietary guidelines and fuel various beneficial metabolites produced by the gut microbiota such as short chain fatty acids (SCFA). Microbiota also produces gases that, in sensitive persons including irritable bowel syndrome patients (IBS), trigger disturbing and at worst disabling gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, leading to the avoidance of fibre-rich foods. The gas formation patterns and amounts are highly individual and interrelated to GI parameters such as gut pH and transit rate. FIBRE-MATCH develops and validates a concept to match DF types to gut microbiome subtypes for optimal metabolic output. The project identifies major DF-metabolising microbiome types prevalent in Europeans using existing metagenomic, dietary and GI symptom data, considering also endogenous glycans. Representative microbiomes and DF will be characterized in vitro to identify metabolic phenotypes. DF combinations yielding an optimal gas to SCFA ratio in vitro will be used to develop fermented food prototypes for proof-of-concept studies in healthy volunteers and IBS patients, to study whether consumption of the microbiome-tailored food improves GI symptoms and IBS markers compared to unmatched fibre, using breath monitoring, metagenome, metabolome and glycan analyses. Biosamples from the healthy subjects will be used to evaluate the effects of DF on risk markers of noncommunicable diseases using metabolomics approaches. A novel database of chemical composition of DF in high-fibre foods will be developed to enable analysis of nutrition-microbiome interactions at functional and molecular level. FIBRE-MATCH fits to the Precision Nutrition Challenge portfolio as it develops fundamental knowledge, capabilities and resources that foster precision nutrition innovations related to individually-tailored microbiome-targeting foods, microbiome-based stratification, and ultimately decreasing the fibre gap.

PIMENTO Promoting Innovation of ferMENTed fOods The long-term goal of PIMENTO is to place Europe at the spearhead of innovation on microbial foods, promoting health, regional diversity, local production at different scales.

Using surface plasmon resonance and calorimetry, the binding of hypertriglyceridemia drug candidates to lipoprotein lipase was tested.