NIZO Food Research Introduces Metabolic Navigator

NIZO food research has developed a navigator for bioconversions, an instrument which facilitates the development of biological ingredients and helps to improve industrial and food related fermentation processes.

22/06/09 The food & fermentation industry can now harvest the fruits of the genomics revolution in biological sciences. Sequencing entire genomes of production bugs and starter cultures is not an academic exercise anymore and has become a routine type of analysis. NIZO food research is acting at the frontline by having developed a metabolic navigator. This is a computer program that predicts all known metabolic conversions in microorganisms. This unique tool facilitates the development of biological ingredients and helps to improve industrial and food related fermentation processes.

Food grade bacteria are being used in food & fermentation industry for preservation, to add flavour & texture and for biofortification with health ingredients. Almost all these functionalities are directly linked to the metabolic activities of the fermenting microbes. Metabolic functions of microbes of interest can be extracted from the genome sequence using state-of-the-art computer software programmes (bioinformatics tools). The newly developed metabolic navigator integrates all knowledge of these microbial metabolic functions into easy accessible metabolic roadmaps. These customized roadmaps can be applied for improving biomass & ingredient yield, quality control of the production medium and discovery and exploitation of new functionalities of starter cultures.

According to Eddy Smid, senior scientist at NIZO and project leader, the metabolic navigators are now ready for routine application in the food fermentation research. ‘This unique tool accelerates the development of starter cultures with new or improved functionality’.