BacHBerry: Strawberries in a pill?

v/Alexey Dudnik

Bacterial hosts for production of bioactive phenolics from berry fruits 

Foredraget foregår på engelsk.

Bacterial hosts for production of bioactive phenolics from berry fruits (BacHBerry) is a 3 year project initiated in November 2014 that is funded by the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7) of the European Union.

The consortium includes twelve research groups, five small and medium-sized enterprises, and one large enterprise coming from 8 EU countries, as well as Chile, China, and Russia.

The overall goal of BacHBerry is to develop a sustainable and a cost-effective pipeline for production of health-promoting berry phenolic compounds using microbial platforms. The project covers the entire scope of activities, starting from screening of berry collections and discovery of novel bioactive phenolic compounds. Once promising candidate compounds are identified, functional genomics is then used for identification and characterization of the corresponding biosynthetic genes from the genomes of the source berry species. The identified genes are then used in construction of cell factories, i.e. bacterial cultures producing the health-promoting polyphenols. The last part of the project consists of optimization of product extraction methods from the culture and scale-up of the production by fermentation up to mini-industrial scale.

Science aside, we aimed at finding beneficial compounds in berries and sustainably producing them in a pure form inside a bioreactor with a help of microbes. So, did we really manage to compact a half a kilo of strawberries into a pill? Come to the lecture and see it for yourself.