BacHBerry: BACterial Hosts for production of Bioactive phenolics from bERRY fruits

BACterial Hosts for production of Bioactive phenolics from bERRY fruits (BacHBerry) was a 3-year project funded by the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Union that ran between November 2013 and October 2016. The overall aim of the project was to establish a sustainable and economically-feasible strategy for the production of novel high-value phenolic compounds isolated from berry fruits using bacterial platforms. The project aimed at covering all stages of the discovery and pre-commercialization process, including berry collection, screening and characterization of their bioactive components, identification and functional characterization of the corresponding biosynthetic pathways, and construction of Gram-positive bacterial cell factories producing phenolic compounds. Further activities included optimization of polyphenol extraction methods from bacterial cultures, scale-up of production by fermentation up to pilot scale, as well as societal and economic analyses of the processes. This review article summarizes some of the key findings obtained throughout the duration of the project

NMR-Based Metabolomics: The Foodome and the Assessment of Dietary Exposure as a Key Step to Evaluate the Effect of Diet on Health

NMR-based metabolomics has gained important insight into the associations between the metabolic status and health, as metabolomics signatures are found in blood, urine, stools, or saliva, differentiating healthy subjects from those affected by diseases or disorders. Although health status has been linked to diet, a measurable fingerprint is rarely found within the metabolome, demonstrating that the diet is curing or, at least, is modifying the subject metabolome away from or closer to a healthy status. The success in finding the correlation between the metabolome and a diet-related disease has, as the main obstacle, the inability to characterize the actual diet followed by the subject. Thus, a big scientific effort has been launched to find metabolite patterns which are characterizing precisely the personal food consumption in order to classify people according to their actual diet. Most of the studies based on NMR-metabolomics are focused on finding biomarkers within the dietary exposome, e.g., originating from food or gut microbiota, without a specific focus on the endogenous metabolome. The main drawback in such approach is a combination of: (i) the actual composition of the meal, (ii) the bioaccessibility of bioactive compounds, and (iii) the processing capability of the gut microbiota. In this chapter, these three aspects are illustrated, where NMR spectroscopy (effectively or potentially) gains relevant information in the discovery of biomarkers for the true food consumption, as a preliminary step in successful \u201cdietary effect studies.\u201