Teagasc Food Programme researchers receive funding from Horizon Europe Research Innovation Action Call

Researchers at Teagasc have received funding for two new projects from the EU’s Horizon Europe Research Innovation Action call.

The DOMINO and Co-Diet projects will begin in early 2023 and will focus on the health benefits of fermented foods and the relationship between diet and non-communicable diseases, respectively. Teagasc is a co-ordinator of the DOMINO project and a partner in Co-Diet.

DOMINO

European consumers are expressing a clear demand for healthier and more sustainable food. Fermented foods have the potential to meet these expectations but there is a need to demonstrate their health impacts scientifically, while developing innovative strategies to tackle both sustainability and nutritional health.

DOMINO is a Horizon Europe-funded Research Innovation Action commencing in March 2023. Teagasc is co-ordinating the project which aims to harness the microbial potential of fermented foods for healthy and sustainable food systems. DOMINO will investigate the health impacts of a fermented food-based diet on a healthy population and a cohort suffering from metabolic syndrome to better focus on health biomarkers.

The project will take a multipronged approach to address these challenges. Randomised control trials will seek to establish a functional impact of fermented foods on health. Microbiome expertise will be used to develop new and novel fermented foods, and improve the sustainability of the food production process via the application of synthetic ecology-based approaches. Associated analysis methods will generate informatics tools for the wider research community. In addition, the project will assess the public perception of fermented foods from groups across Europe, and incorporate this into the design and development components of the project.

At Teagasc, Dr Orla O’Sullivan leads the project with collaborators Professor Paul Cotter, Dr John Kenny, Professor Mark Fenelon and Dr Sinead McCarthy, with further input from Moorepark Technology Ltd.

CO-DIET

Our current understanding of the relationship between diet and the development of non-communicable disease (NCD) is limited by a number of factors. These include a lack of understanding of dietary mechanisms that drive NCD, inaccurate tools to collect dietary information, a nascent understanding of the role of personalised nutrition and the lack of data in vulnerable groups where NCDs are often over-represented. The overarching aim of Co-Diet is to develop a series of tools which will address the current gaps in our knowledge and lead to the development of a tool that will assess dietary-induced NCD risk.

The programme consists of six key objectives:

1. Development of AI-driven literature searching tools to bring a clear understanding of the large global literature in the field of physiological and metabolic links between diet and NCD.
2. Enhance the understanding of NCD risk factors.
3. Improve our understanding of the importance of individual variation in response to diet to the risk of NCD. This will give insight into the targeting of dietary NCD advice.
4. Develop an enhanced method of dietary assessment using machine learning technologies.
5. Develop an enhanced diet-NCD monitoring tool, allowing us to monitor changes in NCD in response to diet at the population level.
6. Develop a dynamic interface between diet and NCD risk factor monitoring and policy to ensure that Co-Diet is applicable at a population level.

The investigation of these objectives and the answers they provide will open a pathway to enhancing the uptake of NCD protective diets at a population level. At Teagasc, Dr Orla O’Sullivan and Professor Paul Cotter and are partners in the project. The project was launched at Imperial College London in January 2023.