Biotechnical Faculty UL Secures up to 2.5 Million in European Funding for the ERA Chair - Foodomics Project

The project, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Nataša Poklar Ulrih from UL BF, includes collaboration not only with researchers from UL BF but also with colleagues from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and the Faculty of Medicine at UL. The ERA Chair is led by internationally renowned expert Prof. Dr. Urška Vrhovšek, head of the metabolomics unit at the Edmund Mach Foundation in Trento, Italy. ERA Chair Foodomics aims to develop new analytical approaches and integrate infrastructure for metabolomic analyses in the food sector.

Food systems contribute to climate change, the reduction of agricultural land, and biodiversity loss while simultaneously needing to respond to these changes. It is no surprise that the food industry faces numerous challenges, including maintaining nutritional adequacy, safety, and quality, reducing food waste, improving nutrition and health, responding to changing consumer preferences and lifestyles (e.g., increased demand for organic food), growing urbanization, and assessing the benefits and risks of emerging technologies.

The establishment of the Center for Metabolomics research will catalyze and accelerate the integration of multiple excellent and pre-existing research groups, working together to create a critical mass of interdisciplinary knowledge necessary to improve national research in food, nutrition, and health. A well-established network of researchers and professors will integrate this knowledge into the educational process at UL.

Under Foodomics, research will be based on a multi-omics approach to enhance food quality and traceability, understand environmental impacts (exposome), and facilitate better understanding of human health and diseases (obesity and diabetes, cancer metabolism, microbiota-driven metabolism in the human body). The research will include nutritional intervention studies, tracking natural bioactive compounds in the human body, studies of human and microbial metabolism, and the discovery and validation of biomarkers. This information will contribute to a better understanding of the impact of nutrition on human health, recognizing interindividual metabolic differences leading to different metatypes (a necessary step toward personalized nutrition), and producing higher-value food using new processing technologies to improve micronutrient bioavailability. The anticipated social impacts and benefits of ERA Chair Foodomics research include improved individual health and well-being, which will also reduce healthcare system burdens.

The ERA Chair Foodomics project will also conduct studies on the molecular mechanisms underlying the biosynthesis of secondary compounds, crucial for advancements in bioactive food compounds, as well as in plant, microbial, and breeding biotechnology. This new knowledge will support the development of modules for combinatorial biosynthesis of natural products, potentially attracting interest from the pharmaceutical (dietary supplements) and food industries (functional foods and novel foods).

The ERA Chair will address the structural integration and infrastructure development needed to create a critical mass of the latest datasets suitable for multimodal experiments, promoting interdisciplinarity and adhering to open science principles. Digital ERA tools will be used to optimize dissemination, access, and sharing of scientific knowledge, facilitating knowledge exchange and fulfilling open science principles for citizens, civil society, and end-users.

The ERA Chair Foodomics will harness UL’s research potential to create a modern, dynamic, and sustainable research environment. Supported by an existing network of international and national partners from universities, institutes, and industry, research results will enable UL to transition from partial, smaller, and fragmented research projects to larger innovation-driven projects. The project will significantly reduce the research and innovation performance gap between Slovenia and the EU. The far-reaching effects of Foodomics will include creating a working environment and center of excellence, along with innovative start-ups.