Award details

Food Innovation

Reference	BBS/E/F/000PR10343
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Dr Brittany Hazard
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Dr Cathrina Edwards, Dr Paul Kroon, Professor Peter Wilde
Institution	Quadram Institute Bioscience
Department	Quadram Institute Bioscience Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	3,828,754
Status	Current
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/04/2018
End date	31/03/2023
Duration	47 months

Abstract

The majority of dietary advice informing policy for the maintenance and promotion of health is based upon observational studies that associate estimations of dietary intake with the occurrence of chronic disease. Observational studies are useful, but cannot provide mechanistic insight of how foods and diets can promote health. Through understanding the underlying mechanisms, the beneficial functional traits of foods can be enhanced. However, it is most challenging to disassociate functional components of individual foods and complex diets from confounding life-style factors, and to design of well controlled human intervention studies with complex foods. To address this challenge, Theme 1 ‘Food Innovation’ will focus on developing innovative foods that have contrasting chemical and physical properties that may affect health related indices including rate of digestion, bioavailability of nutrients and non-nutrient bioactives, gut hormone signalling and microbial communities in the upper and lower GI tract. These foods will be used to test hypotheses in both in vitro and in vivo studies in Themes 2, 3, and 4. This will involve exploiting recent advances in crop genomics including sequenced wheat TILLING populations. Selected crop genotypes with variation in starch biosynthetic genes will be used to explore the effects on digestion of carbohydrates. A complementary approach to delay starch digestion is through food processing and to retain starch (and other macronutrients) within plant organelles in the food product. Experimental foods of this nature will be developed with an emphasis on exploiting pulses to retain plant structures through innovative processing procedures. We will also seek to develop novel food products that are rich in specific plant specialised metabolites that have been implicated in the control of lipid and carbohydrate metabolism or which would be expected to beneficially alter gut microbiota metabolism. This will include using new genetic technologies, including gene editing in Brassica to understand how specialised sulphur metabolism is regulated. New food products will be developed for use in well controlled human intervention studies. The outputs of this work will deliver insights into the genetic regulation of nutritional traits in plants, and how these can be translated into food products which may impact health. Secondly, it will generate experimental material for Themes 2, 3 and 4. It will also facilitate collaboration with the commercial food sector leading to the development of new food products with enhanced nutritional attributes.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Synthetic Biology
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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