Bacterial genome safety assessment

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Introducing NIZO

The use of alternative proteins in food is a major trend in the food industry as feeding the world and sustainability are major drivers for food ingredient and food producers. NIZO focuses on relevant aspects of technologies that enable this transition namely: protein technology, processing technologies, food grade fermentation technologies and the health aspects.

The probiotic journey, from discovery to health benefit substantiation

The market for probiotics and live biotherapeutic products continues to grow, as we increase our understanding of how they can improve health. Probiotic and pharmaceutical companies are looking for ways to use the naturally occurring bacteria in our bodies to amend dysbiosis of the gut, skin and more. Then they must get their products to market, quickly and cost-effectively. But there are many challenges that will define a company’s success or failure – especially when working with living organisms, that don’t always behave the way we want. In this webcast, NIZO's multidisciplinary and multi-stage approach in the probiotic journey, from discovery to health benefit substantiation, will be explained.

Tailoring functionalities during fermentation for dairy alternative fermented foods

We are facing challenges in the world, which strongly drive the innovation of foods. One of the drivers is the increasing demand from consumers for more sustainable food products. Changing from animal-based proteins towards plant-based proteins can increase the sustainability of foods. For this, innovations are necessary as animal-based proteins cannot be directly replaced by plant-based proteins due to different characteristics. Fermentation can therefore be used as a powerful tool to alter these characteristics.

Screen the bacterial genomes of your probiotics for presence of safety compromising genes

The bacterial genome can reveal a lot about its actual behaviour in your product: whether it has the potential to produce toxic products, survive treatments with antibiotics or produce antimicrobial compounds. Before subjecting your probiotic strains to expensive and lengthy experimentation on health benefit substantiating properties, an in silico genome assessment can provide you with the most important first insight: is the strain safe for application?

NIZO offers a fast and automated genome assessment service, specifically designed to provide you with a clear overview of the genomic potential of your strains, in the areas of:

Antibiotic resistance
Virulence
Production of antimicrobial compounds

By selecting this service, you will obtain:

Interactive strain-specific genome reports, searchable and updatable, with general genome information and lists of positively identified genes per functional module.
Insights in unique gene presence/absence profiles of your strain, compared to other (phylogenetically related) strains and reference strains (e.g. type strains or commercially available strains).

Through this service, you will be able to make an informed selection on which strains are most suitable to follow up on, in more extensive and in-depth characterization studies.

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As an add-on to this automated service, NIZO can support you further with a full in silico characterization of your (foreseen) probiotic strains, for instance:

Expert interpretation of identified genes, in relation to safety in application.
Gene mobility assessment of identified genes (i.e. the chance that positively identified genes are transferred to neighbouring strains in the microbial community).
Genome assessment on presence of genes associated with other safety or health benefit related functionalities (e.g. adhesion, carbohydrate utilization, etc).
Design, validation and execution of custom-designed functional modules, based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs).
In situ transcriptomic assessment (i.e. are the identified genes expressed?).
In vitro validation assays of predicted functionalities.
Support on establishing in vivo health substantiation

Bacterial genome safety assessment

Our videos

Screen the bacterial genomes of your probiotics for presence of safety compromising genes

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