listeria, the gut, titanium dioxide

Quadram institute awarded funding for projects

The Quadram Institute has been awarded funding by the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) for two new projects in food safety and microbiology.

The BBSRC Canada Partnering Awards are four-year awards to a maximum of £50,000 over the course of the project, encouraging long-time collaboration with scientists internationally.

The first partnership, led by Dr Matthew Gilmour, will focus on the advancement of genomic tools to study the foodborne transmission of Listeria monocytogenes, ​the cause of the foodborne infection, listeriosis.

Quadram and Gilmour is working with the Public Health Agency of Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory and Health Canada’s Food Directorate on the research.

The project is designed to enable the exchange of ideas and approaches towards Listeria ​and facilitate the development of bioinformatic tools to study key genetic elements of the pathogen.

“The people in this collaboration have already done much work to bring genomic technologies into the mainstream to investigate foodborne illnesses, including listeriosis,”​ said Gilmour.

We have recognised that there are still many gaps in our understanding of how Listeria survives and then spills into the food chain.

“Between our coalition of Canadian and UK experts, we are very excited to work together to further advance our toolset and improve our investigation into the reasons for these continued illnesses.”

The second partnership, led by Dr Evelien Adriaenssens, will focus on a one health approach to understanding and using bacteriophages in the control of enteric pathogens and their effects on the gut microbiome.

Source: foodmanufacture.co.uk

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