NUTRA-SNACKS:
Ready to eat food for breakfast and sport activity with high content of nutraceutics reducing a disease risk and promoting public health.
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Project Description
WorkPackage
Strategic Objectives
Potential Impact
Nutra-snacks is a project funded by the European Commission within the Call FP 6-2004-FOOD-3.
The Project concerns the application of plant cell and in vitro culture systems together with a biotechnological approach in the production of new high quality ready-to-eat food useful in promoting public health. Nutra-Snack aims at the production of food with a high content of natural metabolites whose: anticancer, antilipidemic, anticholesterol, antimicrobial, antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, antihypertensive, antiinflamatory and antioxidant activities etc.
The team, is composed of 5 EU Member States and a group from a Member State candidate (7 research institutes and three SMEs) have been acknowledged groups from the community.
WP1- Selection of organisms and of biological functional metabolites (Main responsible Partner 1, CNR)
WP2-Cell and organ in vitro growth (Main responsible Partner 4, ISS)
WP3-Genetic Engineering (Main responsible Partner 2, MLU)
WP4 - Production of new ready-to-eat food for breakfast, Snack food in bars and nutrients for sport. Risk assessment, Control Trials of quality, taste, safety of the food (Main responsible Partner 9 and sub-Partner 9, SME-Enervit)
WP5-Building a bioreactor for plant cell and/or organ growth. Bioreactor for cell plant and/or organ cultures (Main responsible Partner 10, DAS)
WP6-Analitycal Techniques and set of bio-sensors to control metabolite content in cultures and in food (Main responsible Partner 6, NIB)
- Integrating innovative technology in the field of the agro-industry with the help of 7 research institutes and 3 SMEs from 6 EU countries, in the production of food with high content of natural metabolites whose anticancer, antilipidemic, anticholesterol, antimicrobial, antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, antihypertensive, anti-inflamatory and antioxidant activities have already been acknowledged. The final objective of the project is the production of ready-to-eat snacks rich in nutraceutics.
- Improving the yield and quality of the plant cell growth and in vitro techniques to be used in producing rich nutritive food.
- Applying the transformants as “biological factories” for the further extraction of functional metabolites.
- Constructing a bioreactor to produce Nutraceutics; the bioreactor will be assembled with a set of sensors to monitor the content of the metabolites during the production.
- Contributing to the drawing up of standards for new regulations regarding Nutraceutic, Safety and Quality Control Methods, Risk Assessment, Manuals and Tests, Certifications.
In all these cases our objective is improve the industrial economical balance by an enrichment of the production chain, offering on the market a wider range of new high quality ready-to-eat products suitable for breakfast, snacks and as nutrition for sportsmen and women. Common Spin offs between the SMEs and the research institutes will help in the future commercialisation of the agro-food product with the long-term strategic objective of promoting human health.
The information produced by well designed nutrigenomic studies by NUTRA-SNACKS will be of the most importance in the improvement of dietary advice, functional foods, and/or dietary supplements for which there is an independent and substantial scientific agreement on intakes for maximum benefit/ minimum risk for substantial or specific groups of the population.
The NUTRA-SNACKS impact should be assessed taking into account the:
- Financial benefit
- Consumers benefit
- Consumers perception
Our aim, ultimately, is to make healthier foods that the consumer wants and is happy to eat. Currently, functional foods and supplements are marketed largely with insufficient, quantitative data and with an emphasis on target function (proposed benefit) without the possible unintended negative or harmful effects. Functional genomic technologies are ideally suited to tackle this issue as they enable the global consequences of any given treatment (dietary or otherwise)(on patterns of gene expression and cellular function) to be examined without focusing attention solely on predicted effects. In this regard, generic and specific methodologies need to be developed for comprehensive benefit. Consumers are increasingly looking for food that is healthy and protects them from diseases. Products that fulfill these requirements are likely to be in increasing demand over the medium term. Health food products that are natural or are upgraded with natural ingredients are best able to exploit this trend.
NUTRA-SNACKS’s approach wishes to attract European Industrial Interest. Industrial interest emerged quite early in the story of plant vitro cultures and secondary metabolites. Indeed, at least six large-scale industrial productions were operated by 1990. However, since that time, this technology has been applied in only a few cases in the production of commercial compounds. Unfortunately industrial processes started at a time when basic knowledge (on both plant vitro cultures and secondary compounds) was severely lacking. It is astonishing to realize that a key problem like cell viability, and its assessment, has only been studied recently in plant cells, whereas this topic has been studied for a long time in animal cell cultures. Also, secondary metabolites are produced following long biosynthetic pathways that can involve dozens of enzymes. This synthesis is much more complex than in the case of recombinant proteins which are produced by mammalian or prokaryotic biotechnologies, which usually involve one or two genes. This can partially explain the delay of plant cell and tissue cultures to reach the market compared to other expression systems. A second drawback is the economic feasibility of plant cell and organ cultures. Indeed, this technology requires high-cost bioreactors associated with aseptic conditions that are expensive to maintain.
Our team will try to change more radically the concept of plant cell tissue and organic cultures in automatic bioreactors without the use of a traditional culture chamber. Many attempts will be tried to invent new devices that could lead to breakthroughs in the production of secondary compounds.
However, another chance in the area of plant secondary metabolites can probably be achieved thanks to growing interest in molecular genetics in recent years, through the so-called metabolic engineering approach in the context of ERA, European Research Area.
The future impact of functional food will increasingly be about how it affects our health and well-being. Everyday food products will be adapted to better prevent disease. Marketing concepts will play on people’s concern about their health and disease risks. They may even promise help in diagnosing medical conditions. This scenario is fundamentally different from the marketing and sale of traditional food. Control trials in this direction are underway and will be considered by NUTRA-SNACKS by the application of specific controls.