The MIFFi with an extremely good program (https://miffi.org/), and the FMT will be there too!
Watch out for Ker Sin Ng presenting 'A Novel Microbial Consortium for the Production of Antimicrobial Fermentates Containing Caproate'
and posters by
Mensure Elvan Gezer: 'Optimized Antifungal Propionate Production by Loigolactobacillus coryniformis for Food Preservation' P28
and Rebekka Herdis Lüf: 'Beyond Lactate: Exploring Microbial Cross-Feeding to Improve Antimicrobial Activities' P58
Update: poster prize for Mensure, congratulations!
We celebrated the first PhD student of the FMT group:
Ker Sin Ng succesfully graduate on March 3rd with her work on 'Old Natural Compounds That Are Underexploited--Antimicrobial Mode of Action of Short-chain Carboxylic Acids and Their Potential as Biopreservatives'.
Congratulations Ker Sin!
In a new publication in Microbiology Spectrum, we show that human fecal microbiota is highly competitive for the dairy sugar lactose. Lactose was used through microbial cross-feeding, or (even more interesting) directly by butyrate producers. We had previously observed that Anaerobutyricum hallii can use lactose, but only now have we been able to place it in an ecological context. Competition of the starter culture was much lower, even when added together with lactose.
Read the full story here:
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/spectrum.02193-24Work initiated by Qing Li and Freja Foget Andersen with a lot of contribution from Angeliki Marietou, Carsten Scavenius, Jiří Hošek and Jianbo Zhang.All made possible with funding from Mælkeafgiftsfonden and the Hartmann Foundation.
Functional Microbe Technology started the year with a roam through Aarhus together with our lab buddies Microbial Synthetic Biology (MSB) and Multiscale Microbial Engineering.(MME). We set the foundation for the FMT/MSB/MMB Philosophy and celebrated with a meat-lovers lunch. Great to work with such a wonderful group of people!
With a timely and important editorial on the potential of microbial technology on the initiative of Kenneth Timmis. Take some time and give it a read - it is extensive! Happy to have contributed a tiny bit.
https://lnkd.in/dsahqKC4
...in November, FMT moves to Copenhagen for the annual Danish Microbiology Society meeting. Presented posters and enjoyed a full day with nothing but talking microbiology (and it was a long day). Lucia Huertas Diaz, Ker Sin-Ng and Mensure Elvan acknowledge being supported by a FEMS travel grant.
picture credits, Marta Irla and Angeliki Marietou
I am very happy and proud to announce that I have been recently promoted to Full Professor at Aarhus University.
Despite the many challenges that work at a university entails, there is no other job I would rather have. It is a privilege to provide research-based education to students while running an independent research group, whose curiosity, motivation and unforeseen outcomes make every week unpredictable and never boring.
A big shout out to all the current and past students at University of Alberta, University of Vienna, ETH Zurich, CZU Prague and Aarhus University, you are a big part of this! And it is a pleasure to see thrive still at, or after university.
Heads up to the many colleagues and collaborators past and present and the many coffees that were drunk. Every move was done at a different career stage and asked for an introduction to a new place and university, education style and funding landscape.
And finally, this would all have not been possible without a partner, who agreed to move along even though there was hardly any certainty on where the journey would bring us, and who manages life at home. We are glad that we ended up in Denmark and have been making our base here.
I am looking forward to further consolidating our research on the interface of food and gut biotechnology at Aarhus University that addresses many current societal issues related to sustainable and safe food and gut health.
…and to contribute to the development of the (young) Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering and the Section of Industrial Biotechnology. Look out for us, there will be more to come!
There will be a small celebration, date will be linked in the comments once set.
And the good news came during vacation:
Excellenet news, new paper from Ker Sin on her PhD journey to investigate food relevant short chain carboxylic acids in more detail. Have a look at: https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/spectrum.01658-24?af=R
Watch out, there is more to come!
Funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation for the project BIOFUNC.
This one was a long time in the making - but it was really a matter of the heart. Congratulations and thanks to Qing Li, who kept persistent, and to all the patient collaborators. Funding from the Aarhus Universitet Forskningsfonden and from EMBO for the stay of Qing at ETH Zürich. Glad that fundamental research is still possible!
Link here: https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-024-01863-4
It starts to look real, the labs are getting renovated and FMT with its sister groups MME (Alvaro Lara) and MSB (Marta Irla) are looking forward to moving later this autumn.
It becomes a tradition, in August, BCE retreats to the beautiful Mols Bjerge for two sunny days.. FMT sent 9/170 participants
Finally InfantAD gains momentum! Possible due to funding by the LeoFoundation.
...is finally out. It has been in the pipeline for a while, but very enjoyable collaboration with Maria Florencia Bambace to dig deeper into the use of sourdough microbes in our adopted country and its neighbours. Part of COST action CA18101 'Sourdomics'
Happy to be granted resource time at the pan-European pre-exascale supercomputer, LUMI. i-Tarmen metagenomes, here we come!
The year started with a lot of education related activities, but now some first research news in 2024: We have a new paper in Microbial Biotechnology, and indentified the (first?) species of the Lactobacillaceae, who transform the deoxyhexose rhamnose to propionate. We provide some first indication that propionate-containing fermentates act as antimicrobials against Salmonella. Have a look:
Full paper available here:
https://ami-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1751-7915.14392
Experimental work excellenty led by Ena and Mie with a lot of interactions with other members of the FMT group and with support of Ulrik Sundekilde from AU-FOOD: More to come, please watch out for us!
...with a small contribution by the FMT group. Congratulation to Anja and Markus et al.!
Full paper here: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.123.065517
Find us in Copenhagen next week at the yearly Danish Microbiology Society Congress.
Watch out for Ker Sin Ng presenting on 'Environmental pH and compound structure affect the potential of short-chain carboxylic acids as antimicrobial metabolites' in Session 3 'Innovation through fermentation: microorganisms for food, feed and fun'
and posters of:
Angeliki Marietou 'Lactose addition increases expression of fecal microbiota beta-galactosidases and the fermentative production of butyrate independent of the presence of starter cultures' &
Mensure Elvan 'Deoxyhexoses as overlooked fermentation substrates for food microbes'
Yes, we published our last year's study on the fermentability of fucose (actively fermented) and fucoidan (not a gut microbe's favorite) by human fecal microbiota.
More to be found here:
https://academic.oup.com/femsec/article/99/10/fiad107/7287365?searchresult=1
More to come in the future, we will continue to work on exciting fucoidan and find ways to make it accessible to bacteria!
Ker Sin obtained a Short Term Research Grant from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) to support her secondment at the Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) at the Universität Bielefeld. Congratulations Ker Sin, and enjoy your stay!
We are delighted to receive generous funding from the LEO Foundation, which will allow us to continue collaborating with Caroline Roduit and Remo Frei (Inselspital Bern, Switzerland) and Hanne Frøkiær (Copenhagen University, Denmark) to work on infant gut microbiota development and the occurrence of atopic dermatitis. Please find out more here: https://leo-foundation.org/en/grantee/
We will have an opening for a postdoc position soon!
That was delightful news during holiday time, paper accepted. Congratulation Lucia! Thanks to all the collaborators from Denmark, Switzerland and the Czech Republic and to the NNF Foundation and AUFF for funding.
Feel free to check the paper out at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2023.2241209
Meet us at FEMS Microbiology 2023 in Hamburg.
We will be presenting:
posters at 'Food Microbiology' Poster Area level 1, monday morning:
M71 Lucia Huertas Diaz 'Short chain carboxylic acids as antimicrobials against food and gut related clostridia'
M121 Ker Sin Ng 'Environmental pH and short chain carboxylic acid structure affect antimicrobial activity and biofilm formation of Salmonella'
and a flash presentation at FP5/8: Environmental Microbiology & Ecology, Monday 16:30-18.00
of Dr. Qing Li 'Biomarkers predict the presence of a common intestinal microbial function and the relationship to diet and gut physiology'
photo courtesy of Jakub Hosek
Looking forward to working on 'A novel sustainable bioprocess to obtain nutritious single cell protein (SustainPro)' with Dr. Maria Florencia Bambace (FMT) and Mario Martinez Martinez (AU-FOOD)
The more we read about short chain carboxylic acids (which seems to be the most encompassing term), the more complex the mode of action became. Great effort of Ker Sin to keep the overview. The next generation of AU students will for sure hear about this paper in the biopreservation lectures ;).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214799323000802
Glad to receive funding from the DFF - it will be FERMOSE: 'An overseen role of fermentation of L-fucose by intestinal microbiota'. Looking forward to a collaboration with Prof. Tillmann Lüders from the University of Bayreuth, Germany.
Great initiative of Prof. Irla, Lucia Huertas Diaz and Ker Sin Ng to organize a first retreat of a young section. More than 40 participants and two days of discussions about and beyond science, hopefully there will be a second event next year!
We would be happy to host a MSCA-PF in Aarhus. Please get in touch if you could imagine to work with us!
The A.P. Møller Fonden supports our project i-Tarmen, a collaboration with the TU Kaiserslautern, Germany.
We were cohosting a seminar with the Food&Biocluster with presentations by domesticlab, raw kombucha, Mycorena, Cellugy and members of the AU Industrial Biotechnology Section. Glad to see that there is such an enthusiastic food microbe community in Aarhus!
Glad to receive funding from the Brødrene Hartman Fonden and the Danish Dairy Foundation/Melkeafgiftsfonden to start the sister projects BioDairy and Bio2Lak in collaboration with Prof. Hanne Frøkiær, University of Copenhagen.
We spent a full day in Copenhagen doing nothing but talking microbes - very enjoyable.
Microbial Biotechnology celebrates 15 years, and we were invited to contribute a mini-review discussing how human gut microbes ferment dietary nutrients during the first year of life.
It developed into:
The full paper is available at: https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1751-7915.14165
Eugenio Ingrebelli from the Czech University of Life Sciences joined the lab to work for 2 months with the FMT group. Welcome!
Does acrolein produced by microbe react with extracellular biomolecules? It does!
Update February 2023:
The paper become part of a virtual collection: 'Women in Toxicology' to Celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
Find an interview with Clarissa here: https://axial.acs.org/biology-and-biological-chemistry/women-in-toxicology-interviews-part4
The FMT group is glad to host Mensure Elvan from the İzmir Institute of Technology, Turkey as part of the COST action SOURDOMICS (CA18101, Short Term Scientific Mission Grant) from August to October.
Finally published! Collaboration with Mari Sasaki and colleagues in Switzerland:
New paper in collaboration with Assist. Prof. Jianbo Zhang:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772753X22000326?via%3Dihub
Four years in the making while three children were born by the first and last author, and collaborators from 3 and then 4 countries, CZ, CH, D and now DK.
available at
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2022.848490/full
The Functional Microbe Technology group published its first Aarhus paper that was a collaboration between the Departments of Biological and Chemical Engineering, Food Science and Public Health.
Available at:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756464622001591
A happy FMT group! Clarissa Schwab became Research Program Leader of the NNF and Ascending Investigator in Food Biotechnology! BIOFUNC will start in September 2021
https://researchleaderprogramme.com/recipients/clarissa-schwab/
We always have openings for bachelor and master theses in food and gut biotechnology and microbial ecology. Please contact us for current projects.
If you are interested in joining as Erasmus student, feel free to write!
An early present before the holidays - new paper published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology!
We continued our investigations on rhamnose utilizing lactobacilli to produce propionate-containing fermentates that were antibacterial and antifungal. Many more details to be found here:
https://lnkd.in/ddJcjZcy
Excellent work led by Mensure Elvan and Kathrine Fønss with support by Maria Florencia Bambace, Angeliki Marietou, Sanne Sandberg OVerby and Ulrik Sundekilde. Funding from Indepdent Research Fund Denmark and the Novo Nordisk Foundation.