Metabolic navigator

Improve your fermentation process with our Metabolic navigator

The time has come for the food and fermentation industry to harvest the fruits of the genomics revolution in biological sciences. Sequencing entire genomes of production bugs and starter cultures is no longer an academic exercise but has become a routine type of analysis. NIZO food research is acting at the frontline to translate these developments into concrete applications for our customers in the food and fermentation industry. One of the recent innovations is a navigator for bioconversions, an instrument which facilitates the development of biological ingredients and helps to improve industrial and food related fermentation processes.

Metabolic roadmap

Food grade bacteria are being used in the food and fermentation industry for preservation, to add flavour and texture, and for biofortification with health ingredients. Almost all these functionalities are directly linked to the metabolic activities of the fermenting microbes. Metabolic functions of microbes of interest can be extracted from the genome sequence using state-of-the-art computer software programs (bioinformatics tools). The newly developed metabolic navigator integrates all knowledge of these microbial metabolic functions into easily accessible metabolic roadmaps. These customized roadmaps can be applied for (i) improving biomass and ingredient yield, (ii) quality control of the production medium and (iii) discovery and exploitation of new functionalities of starter cultures.

Application

Recently NIZO food research researchers elegantly demonstrated¹ the use of a genome scale metabolic model of Lactobacillus plantarum for a simple but highly effective improvement of aerobic fermentation conditions. 

¹ Stevens et al. 2008. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 74:4776-4778.